You are right that our demand in bandwidth is comparably low, Ryan. But we
do have an extremely strong brand, and the power of some really great
people working and volunteering for Wikimedia. This is why I was hoping
that someone could explain the technicalities of the U.S. energy system to
me – can't we simply ask our datacenter providers to order renewable energy
for our servers, maybe for an extra charge? This is what you can do in
Europe, but I have a feeling things are not just as easy in the U.S.
Thanks,
Lukas
2016-05-16 19:40 GMT+02:00 Ryan Lane <rlane32(a)gmail.com>om>:
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
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