JJ Nitro

2008-03-08, 11:05:55

My computer already heats my office. When I've got it going full blast—burning a DVD, playing music, and with 50 tabs open in Firefox—the fan gets going and it puts out a lot of warmth.

Now IBM is planning to put this kind of waste heat to use on a larger scale, piping heat out of corporate data centers and into nearby homes, according to this New Scientist article.

The stats on energy consumption by data centers are pretty astonishing:

Data centres worldwide consume 120 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually and account for 2 per cent of global CO₂ emissions—about the same as that from aviation. About half the energy a data centre uses goes into keeping its servers cool.

I won't look at downloading movies the same again. How much energy does it take for me to watch a Netflix movie streaming, as opposed to getting it in the mail?

A recent article on Slate weighed up energy used to deliver an electronic newspaper to your computer as opposed to getting the paper version ("ink on dead trees") to your doorstep. Though different estimates came up with different answers—some people saying the paper used less energy, others favoring the e-version—the fact that the two would be close enough to debate shocked me.

So with movies moving toward online, streaming movies on Netflix and other sites, it seems that with current data centers dumping their waste heat out the door, the streaming movies must be worse for the environment than getting the disc mailed to your house.

Another way of conceptualizing the surprising amount of energy that computers eat up is to compare the energy needed to run a character in a virtual world like Second Life, compared with some real life people. The Associated Foreign Press is running a story that appeared a while back, but it's worth repeating: "Second Life avatars and Brazilians: the same carbon footprint."

But maybe if plans like IBM's get off the ground, then streaming movies could at least be competitve, energy-wise.