The Greening of the Cloud

Grazed from IEEE TechTalk. Author: Tekla Perry.

An abundance of cheap, renewable energy, particularly hydropower and geothermal, has drawn aluminum smelters to Iceland. It’s become an industry that already consumes five times as much electricity as the country’s residents, and more aluminum plants are on the drawing board—raising concerns about how much the country’s economy is relying on one industry.

Meanwhile, there is another fast-growing, power-hungry industry in the world: cloud computing and storage. “The cloud” seems so light and fluffy, but building a cloud involves huge clunky buildings full of servers. Just one of these server farms, according to an April report by Greenpeace, can consume the energy equivalent of 180 000 homes. The companies that run them do their best to be efficient, because high energy costs hurt profits—and also, in some cases at least, because of a corporate commitment to the environment. The April Greenpeace report praised Yahoo and Google for “prioritizing access to renewable energy in their cloud expansion” but criticized Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft for rapidly expanding their clouds “without adequate regard to source of electricity,” relying “heavily on dirty energy.”…

Which brings us back to Iceland. Even with all that aluminum smelting, Iceland has a renewable energy surplus. And, since the recent addition of two new, high-speed, transatlantic fiber optic cables to the country’s single older fiber cable (and one more going into service soon) it’s got bandwidth to spare as well…

Read more from the source @ http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/renewables/the-greening-of-the-cloud