[Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

[Geoffrey Plourde]

The only reason the servers and internet access produce CO2 emissions is because of the defective and antiquated energy production systems we use across the world. As we move towards more efficient and "cleaner" means of energy production, the carbon footprint should decrease. 


Moving servers to Scandinavia would be interesting, but a unsound logistical idea. I agree that it would be a effective reuse of energy, but I am concerned about the access problem of relocating assets in one region. Now, placing new servers in Scandinavia on a grid so that the energy production can be reused is not a bad idea, but would be something for the chapters there to look at.

With regards to Florida, if the servers are in an office building, one way to decrease costs might be to reconfigure the environmental systems to use the energy from the servers to heat/cool the building. Wikimedia would then be able to recoup part of the utility bills from surrounding tenants. 

However, engineering input would be most beneficial to considering these interesting proposals. 

Geoffrey



________________________________
From: Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com>
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Sat, December 12, 2009 8:32:12 AM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

You have probably heard about CO2 and the conference being held these
days in Copenhagen (1).

You have probably heard about the goal of carbon neutrality at the
Wikimania conference in Gdansk in July 2010 (2).

You may want to discuss the basic and perhaps naive wishes I have
written down on the strategy wiki about paper consumption (3).

Do we have an idea of the energy consumption related to the online
access to a Wikipedia article ? Some people say that a few minutes
long search on a search engine costs as much energy as boiling water
for a cup of tea : is that story true in the case of Wikipedia (4) ?

How about moving the servers (5) from Florida to a cold country
(Alaska, Canada, Finland, Russia) so that they can be used to heat
offices or homes ? It might not be unrealistic as one may read such
things as "the solution was to provide nearby homes with our waste
heat" (6).

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference_2009
(2) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2010/Bids/Gda%C5%84sk#Environmental_issues
(3) http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Environmental_policy_for_paper_products
(4) http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece
(5) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
(6) http://www.greenercomputing.com/news/2009/12/08/giant-data-center-heat-london-homes

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l