On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 1:42 AM, Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
Lukas Mezger lukas.mezger@gmail.com wrote:
With the help of Juliet Barbara and Gregory Varnum, we now have detailed public figures regarding the energy use and energy sources of the Wikimedia servers: As of May 2016, the servers use 222 kW, summing up to about 2 GWh of electrical energy per year. For more information, please see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact.
The next step would be to figure out the cost and feasibility of having the servers run on 100% renewable energy. I'd appreciate it if someone could help me find out how this works. As a European consumer, I can order renewable energy for my house simply by calling my energy company on the phone, with the price difference being negligible. I assume it is not just as easy in our case, right?
At Hawaii consumer prices, 2 GWh equals less than US-$ 800,000; that would be roughly 1 % of the Wikimedia Foundation budget. Don't you think it would be much better for *actually* reducing the environmental impact to start on the 99 % (or probably more like 99.5 %)? It would certainly be cheaper than paying *more* for energy.
What is an energy consumption estimate of the other 99% of budget expenditure?