On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 12:45 AM, Lukas Mezger <lukas.mezger(a)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