
Our love of the cloud is making a green energy future impossible - ptcampbell
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/25/our-love-of-the-cloud-is-making-a-green-energy-future-impossible/
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djannzjkzxn
I found this article’s central claim to be unsupported by its content. It
talks about lot about how some specific uses of electricity are increasing,
but it doesn’t say how the absolute magnitude of those uses compares to
overall carbon emissions. This would be necessary to show that “the cloud is
making a green energy future impossible”. I suspect this information was left
out because cloud energy use accounts for a very small slice of global
emissions.

The statistics they do cite are often misleading, and are never very
convincing. For example, comparing the energy use from streaming a video to
riding a train or walking. In reality, all of those energy uses are
negligible. In other words, they are comparing video streaming to the most
efficient versions of transportation, and ignoring the sources of most
transportation-related emissions. Run that comparison between video streaming
and flying to a meeting in person!

It reminds me of an article I once saw funded by the meat industry which
showed that the water requirements to produce a calorie of beef are lower than
a calorie of lettuce (ignoring calorie-dense plants such as grains and legumes
that are much more efficient).

This one is a doozy:

> This grand ‘experiment’ in shifting societal energy use is visible, at least
> indirectly, in one high-level fact set. By the first week of April, U.S.
> gasoline use had collapsed by 30 percent, but overall electric demand was
> down less than seven percent.

By the article’s own numbers, energy use actually went down! Then they somehow
use this fact to prove that the digital future will use more energy?

Later, they make more strange comparisons, like datacenters to skyscrapers,
when of course, most of the world’s energy use doesn’t come from skyscrapers.
And they bizarrely compare datacenter energy use to electric car energy use,
when again, electric cars obviously aren’t yet a major component of energy
usage.

Overall, I feel this article is not fact-driven reporting. It’s twisting the
numbers with the aim of making people who care about the environment misdirect
their concerns toward software companies.

To make a more constructive recommendation - if you’re concerned about carbon
emissions, start by looking at a breakdown of which industries are responsible
for the most emissions!

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1cvmask
There is a secular increase in the usage of digital products and digital
transformation.

The movement to the cloud is more energy efficient than companies running
everything on-premises.

Usage of remote working tools will lower the carbon footprint of employees and
workers.

How much these efficiencies will be canceled out by the mass movement to
digital transformation will be obvious in ten years from now.

Meanwhile there is an increase in clean energy that will cancel out some of
this growth in digital transformation.

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xg15
> _The movement to the cloud is more energy efficient than companies running
> everything on-premises._

For private users, how is downloading a song or movie again _each time I want
to watch it_ more energy efficient that having it on my hard drive?

For corporate users, "Cloud software" is to a large part replacing traditional
desktop software. As such, the comparison is only partially with in-house data
centers - it's also with software running exclusively on users' actual work
PCs - which they would shut down after they have finished working.

Even if you compare client/server software, you leaving out the energy
expended by routing the data over the internet. Even if the cloud service
itself can use energy more efficiently inside their data center, routing uses
energy that you wouldn't need for a server in the basement.

> _How much these efficiencies will be canceled out by the mass movement to
> digital transformation will be obvious in ten years from now._

Which is probably too late.

