Lukas Mezger wrote:
I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact. The main idea is to use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main reason for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector.
This issue has been discussed previously. I would recommend trawling through the mailing list archives to find older discussions.
A somewhat cynical reply from May 2009: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/051656.html. I can't find the rest of that thread off-hand, but surely it's somewhere.
In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be.
There's been a greater push for transparency in the past few months. I think what you want here from the Wikimedia operations team is a full index of the particular hardware that's in use in the various data centers. That would allow you or others to take this list of hardware and research its energy use. Most of the hardware is off-the-shelf from Dell and other companies, I believe, so information about its specifications, including energy use, is likely already public.
MZMcBride