Cloud computing, the "Black Hand" that makes carbon dioxide?

The internet is far less environmentally friendly than you might think, and cloud computing is more likely to create a thick layer of carbon dioxide that wraps around the earth.

It is reported that Tencent is building a cloud computing center in Chongqing, the future of the central server will reach 300,000 units, the size of Tencent in Tianjin's cloud computing center. Before that, there was also news that Chongqing would like to build a "cloud SAR", Europe and the United States outsourced to the Asian region 10 million of the 2 million-3 million units will be placed in Chongqing.

Based on 3 million servers, estimated by industry standard, the power of each server is approximately 400W (the power consumption required to dissipate heat), That is, each cloud computing server power consumption of 0.4 degrees per hour, the whole day power consumption of 9.6 degrees, 3 million server power consumption of 28.8 million degrees, its annual power consumption will exceed 10 billion degrees.

And China Unicom data center consumes 9.9 billion degrees per year, according to China's current coal efficiency, need to consume 920,000 tons coal. China Telecom's data center consumes 11.2 billion degrees a year, consuming 1.0295 million tons of coal. Therefore, it is easy to calculate the coal consumption of Chongqing "cloud SAR". 2011, China's data center energy consumption accounted for 5% of the total energy consumption, is 3 times times the United States.

In May this year, the former director of the National Energy Bureau, Zhang Zhang, said in the China-US Clean Energy Forum that the Chinese coal-fired fuel-generating units accounted for 78%, thermal power accounted for 83%, as the carbon dioxide emissions caused by coal have reached 9.8 billion tons.

It seems that the rapid development of cloud computing has turned into a "Barroth" and a heavy environmental burden on China. Of course, foreign high-tech companies do not perform much better than Chinese companies.

Last April, the international environmental group Greenpeace Apple as the "least green" technology company. It said in its report that the energy needed for the Apple data Center was the largest reliance on coal, up to 54.5% per cent, followed by Facebook (53.2%), IBM (51.6%), Hewlett-Packard (49.4%) and Twitter (42.5%).

As for Google, Gartner's research shows that Google handles 13 billion search requests a month, and that each search consumes 100 watts of light for 11 seconds, producing CO2 as much as a car driving 7.62 centimeters. If monthly, the 13 billion-time search consumes as much power as the 100-watt light bulb will light up in 4534, as many as the car's 626506-mile CO2.

Gartner also notes that the IT industry emits 2% of the world's total emissions of carbon dioxide. The University of Bristol scientists calculate that now each person's cloud computing demand 3200 megabytes per day, the global cloud computing power 1.175 trillion watts per day, equivalent to 100 Beijing.

Of course, the list of these data is not to be unworthy, to delay the pace of scientific and technological progress, but to remind people of the need to quickly find alternative coal and clean energy, improve the efficiency of the use of electricity.

Francois Ajenstat, senior director of the Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Division, responded: Data centers and cloud computing services can help people reduce their impact on the environment, unified communications technology can reduce the travel, the use of household energy management services can help users reduce resource consumption; In order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Microsoft has used water and electricity as a major source of energy in the data centers of Quincy and Washington, and in Dublin and Ireland, using outside natural cold air to regulate the temperature of the data center, an energy-saving measure of 50%.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)