Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list, I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>. The main idea is to use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main reason for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector. My project was started after Greenpeace USA published a report <http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/> about the energy consumption of the biggest sites on the Internet in 2015 and in which Wikipedia, to my astonishment, performed poorly, receiving a "D" score and only passing because of the Wikimedia Foundation's openness about its energy consumption.

I would very much like to change that and set up a page called "Environmental impact <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>" on Meta. I have already discussed the issue with a few people both from the Wikimedia Foundation's management and from the Wikimedia community and have received positive responses.

In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be. Also, I am interested to learn how changing a server site's energy sources can be carried out on the operations side since the United States energy sector hasn't been completely deregulated yet. So, thank you very much for any comments! Maybe there also is an even better forum to discuss these questions? Finally, if you would like to support my project, please consider adding your name to this list <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact#Show_your_support>. Thank you. Kind regards, Lukas Mezger / User:Gnom <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnom> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>. The main idea is to use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main reason for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector.

In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be.

Hi all, Thanks Lukas for bringing this back up. Since my name was mentioned, I'll share some context, but I'm copying my colleague Juliet Barbara who is best positioned to move this forward, as she is the current holder of our relationship with Greenpeace. The Comms, Finance, and COO teams met with Greenpeace in 2015 to discuss the ways the WMF could improve our overall environmental footprint. The Foundation already has some positive efforts underway formally and informally - IIRC, we included clean energy consumption as a factor in evaluating in our RFC for our choice of a backup colo a few years back, we are transparent (if not overly proactive) in disclosure of energy consumption, we have sensible policies around server efficiency and hardware replacement, and we have pushed for clean energy alternatives for our SF office consumption. We are less effective in areas such as advocacy and purchasing (e.g., stating this is a priority for the movement, pushing our colos to provide clean sources/mixes). Some of these are questions of scale and efficiency - Ops runs a tight ship, and we're a relatively small footprint in our colos, so we don't necessarily have the ability to drive purchasing decisions based on scale alone. At the time the report came out, we started talking to Lukas about how we could improve our efforts at the WMF and across the movement, but we've had limited bandwidth to move this forward in the Foundation (and some transitions in our Finance and Operations leadership, who were acting as executive sponsors). However, I think it's safe to say that we'd like to continue to reduce our environmental impact, and look forward to the findings of this effort. Katherine On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 8:17 AM, Lukas Mezger &lt;lukas.mezger(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: idea the in "D" that have a much -- Katherine Maher Wikimedia Foundation 149 New Montgomery Street San Francisco, CA 94105 +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher(a)wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On 31/03/16 02:55, Katherine Maher wrote: Since I strongly support emissions reduction, on my own initiative I did an analysis of expected CO2 emissions of each of the candidate facilities during the selection process of the backup colo. That's presumably what you're referring to. < https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1adt45Msw2o8Ml0s8S0USm9QLkW9ER3xCPkU… My conclusion was that codfw (the winner) was one of the worst candidates for CO2 emissions. However, the price they were offering was so much lower than the other candidates that I could not make a rational case for removing it as an option. You could buy high-quality offsets for our total emissions for much less than the price difference. However, this observation does require us to actually purchase said offsets, if codfw is to be represented as an ethical choice, and that was never done. codfw would not tell us their PUE, apparently because it was a near-empty facility and so it would have technically been a very large number. I thought it would be fair to account for marginal emissions assuming a projected higher occupancy rate and entered 2.9 for them, following a publication which gave that figure as an industry average. It's a new facility, but it's not likely that they achieved an industry-leading PUE since the climate in Dallas is not suitable for evaporative cooling or "free" cooling. colos, I think it's stretching the metaphor to call ops a "tight ship". We could switch off spare servers in codfw for a substantial power saving, in exchange for a ~10 minute penalty in failover time. But it would probably cost a week or two of engineer time to set up suitable automation for failover and periodic updates. Or we could have avoided a hot spare colo altogether, with smarter disaster recovery plans, as I argued at the time. My idea wasn't popular: Leslie Carr said she would not want to work for an organisation that adopted the relaxed DR restoration time targets that I advocated. And of course DR improvements were touted many times as an effective use of donor funds. Certainly you have a point about scale. Server hardware has extremely rudimentary power management -- for example when I checked a couple of years ago, none of our servers supported suspend-to-RAM, and idle power usage hardly differed from power usage at typical load. So the only option for reducing power usage of temporarily unused servers is powering off, and powering back on via out-of-band management. WMF presumably has little influence with motherboard suppliers. But we could at least include power management and efficiency as consideratons when we evaluate new hardware purchases. had We could at least offset our datacentre power usage, that would be cheap and effective. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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?

Lukas Mezger &lt;lukas.mezger(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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.

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?

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 &lt;rlane32(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: run it's datacenters expect _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list, I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>. The main idea is to use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main reason for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector. My project was started after Greenpeace USA published a report <http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/> about the energy consumption of the biggest sites on the Internet in 2015 and in which Wikipedia, to my astonishment, performed poorly, receiving a "D" score and only passing because of the Wikimedia Foundation's openness about its energy consumption. I would very much like to change that and set up a page called "Environmental impact <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>" on Meta. I have already discussed the issue with a few people both from the Wikimedia Foundation's management and from the Wikimedia community and have received positive responses. In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be. Also, I am interested to learn how changing a server site's energy sources can be carried out on the operations side since the United States energy sector hasn't been completely deregulated yet. So, thank you very much for any comments! Maybe there also is an even better forum to discuss these questions? Finally, if you would like to support my project, please consider adding your name to this list <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact#Show_your_support>. Thank you. Kind regards, Lukas Mezger / User:Gnom <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnom> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l