o one would deny we need to get to zero carbon as soon as possible. Well, there are a few who might. But deniers aside, most readers of FEED understand how science works and that industries need
corporate communications, and the great mass of industrial applications running in the cloud which will only increase in size and complexity. A report in Wired magazine in December 2019 ranked the top-three cloud providers for their carbon output. Google, the smallest of the three mentioned, was best with “net zero carbon emissions”, though the piece also pointed out that the digital behemoth had started an oil and gas division. Microsoft came second, claiming carbon neutrality since 2012 and that it had run on 100% renewable energy since 2014 ( Wired said Microsoft also recently partnered with the oil and gas industry). AWS, the biggest of the three, came third. Amazon executive chair, Jeff Bezos, announced a long-term commitment to running data centres on all renewables and achieving net zero by 2040. Chinese cloud giant Alibaba wasn’t in the rankings, although Greenpeace criticised the company earlier this year for not releasing its emissions data. The general picture is one of an industry trying to be green, but certainly not hurrying to zero carbon. The term net zero, which modern business is clinging to like a life raft, simply means continuing to emit carbon, but paying for it elsewhere – with tree planting, carbon credits, or investment in a dam or windfarm that your business is never going to actually use. Net zero is like the indulgences sold by the medieval church, that allowed rich people to get out of hell if they paid up. But zero carbon is a long, long way off.
to completely decarbonise. A lot of companies have set a goal of 2030, some earlier. But we’re all living on borrowed time. Full decarbonisation needed to be done yesterday. The servers we use to run our digital economy consume a huge amount of energy. Occasionally, companies such as Facebook have made gestures towards reducing their carbon footprint by moving servers to cooler regions in the far north, sometimes run with renewables – like their server farm in Sweden, using hydropower. But the cloud is, by definition, distributed across wide geographies – all over the world to some degree. It’s not impossible that the project you’re working on, via a single browser interface, is actually in separate pieces, being passed off between continents. The demands we’re making on cloud are more and more extreme, and we regard it intellectually as an infinite resource, with processor power the only limiting factor. While a good many people are already accessing 4K video, it’s still a relatively small number compared to the potential of viewers globally. The project of 4K on-demand to anyone with access to a screen is just getting started. Coming up close behind are VR and AR applications, increasingly compute-intensive
THE GENERAL PICTURE IS ONE OF AN INDUSTRY TRYING TO BE GREEN, BUT CERTAINLYNOT HURRYING TO ZERO CARBON
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