The internet and all of its required server farms or data centers is a profoundly unsustainable part of our world. If you don’t believe that, check out this article by Jane Anne Morris (DemocracyThemePark.org) which was originally published in the May 31, 2012, and January 8, 2013 editions of Earth First! Journal.
Save a tree, bank online. Subscribe Online, reduce your carbon footprint. Listen to music online, watch movies online, read books online. No mess, no fuss. Google Inc. has photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on its headquarters. With all that footprint-lightening, you may soon be down to no ecological footprint at all, right?
Since everyone wants the Internet to have a gentle footprint and not be “evil,” we should power it with green electricity. Start with a bicycle generator and a server. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures.
All the stuff on the Internet, or in the “cloud,” is kept aloft by computers called servers (plus routers and so on). An average server draws 400 watts/hour, half of that for cooling (fairly typical), and 3500 kilowatt-hours (kwh) per year, 1 because it never shuts down.
A healthy biker can produce a constant 100 watts/hour on a bicycle generator, a generous estimate. Four generator bikes at 100 watts/hour apiece would power a server. Alas, that single server can’t accomplish much by itself. Various techies have estimated that a single online search activates between 1000 and 20,000 servers, often located all over the world.
Numerous servers are housed together in places called server farms or data centers. To power a modest-sized data center (50,000 servers) by bicycle power would require almost a million pedalers and an area equivalent to 347 football fields.2Data centers can be as small as closets at the back of a business, or as large as several football fields and use as much electricity as small cities. They run 24/7/365, and tend to have multiply redundant backup systems, so no one has to wait ten seconds to learn from a web site if it’s raining outside.
If you live in a city or a large town, you probably pass by one or more data centers each day. But they don’t advertise themselves with signs saying, “Corporate Data Center Containing Highly Sensitive Personally Identifiable Information,” so you might not notice. And you won’t see 347 football fields of bike generators surrounding them because they’re powered by the coal and nuclear power plants that supply most electricity in the U.S. …
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