Green internet?

I've been reading a lot lately about how the internet is going green. "Green"? I say. They'll put that green spin on anything to sell something. I remember when computers started being used in offices and people were starting to be able to afford them, and the promises that it would save paper and time. Well, frankly, that didn't pan out. As much as I try, I think there is more paper printed than ever before.

So I couldn't really understand how the internet wasn't green already, apart from the pile of paper that we waste trying to print something out.

Well, apparently when you think about it, our computers use quite a bit of energy. We are all switching to flat screen monitors that are meant to be energy efficient, and turn them off completely when we aren't using them, right? What about the servers that we connect to in order to see those gazillions of websites? Now that is where the energy is really being consumed.

How are they consuming so much energy? All of our banking, google searches are done through Data Centres. these are generally a facility used to house computer systems. A moderate sized data centre will consume about 1 megawatt of electricity, but many of the larger facilities like Google can require more than 20 megawatts to keep it running. That's enough to power 15,000 homes. These larger data centres have computer servers that are packed into warehouses. The servers heat up so need a large amount of electricity first of all just to cool them using air conditioning. Lighting will also use up electricity. And the busier these servers get, the more electricity that is needed as more heat is generated.

So a lot of these companies are trying to reduce their costs as well as trying to reduce their footprint. A company called Peer 1 is starting work on a new data centre in Scarborough that they say will be their largest facility and it's most efficient. And the way it will do it won't add much to their building costs. They'll pump in cold air from outside (this is Canada, after all) for most of the year to cool their servers. At the same time the heat from those servers will by recycled and vented to offices in the building that need heating, eliminating the need to pay for heating. They will construct barriers to keep the areas that need to be cool from those that need to be warm. They will also have a "cool roof", which is a roof made of light coloured material that will reflect the sun, rather than absorb it. They are also considering a rainwater collection system as a way to irrigate their surrounding property.

These sound like sensible ideas without a solar panel or wind turbine to be seen. It would be nice to see in the next decade or so, these ideas becoming the norm for regular properties, not just energy gobbling companies.