Some of this depends on geography.
For example, in Washington State, we have significant hydroelectric capacity. (See http://www.eia.gov/state/print.cfm?sid=WA)
My understanding is that some data centers are being placed in the far global north to take advantage of cold air or water temperatures for data center cooling.
Pine On May 18, 2016 14:33, "Lukas Mezger" lukas.mezger@gmail.com wrote:
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@gmail.com:
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
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