On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 12:45 AM, Lukas Mezger lukas.mezger@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, we're also looking into reducing the environmental impact of the rest of the activities in the Wikimedia movement. And I am very aware that many websites consume a lot more energy than Wikipedia does. (Please see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact for more information.)
But this doesn't mean we should not try to have the Wikimedia servers run on renewable energy. Even some big for-profit companies like Apple and Yahoo are already doing this. So, how can we get there as well and what would it cost us?
When you're as large as Apple or Yahoo, it's easy to pressure your infrastructure providers to run on renewables. Wikimedia has basically no bargaining power because they spend very little money (because they don't run a lot of servers). I know Wikimedia feels huge and important, and it's important in a lot of ways, but when it comes to pressuring datacenter providers, it may as well not exist.
It's possible that the only available option is to bring up new datacenters in areas with renewable energy, and those datacenters may not be as reliable, they may not be as well connected from a networking point of view, they may have poor security and many other issues. I wouldn't expect much movement towards renewables here until there's some really large companies pushing for this in the relevant datacenters.
- Ryan