The internet is ruining the environment?

All my music, email, pictures, blog posts, etc. are stored in "the cloud" these days, and before I read the article below, I never really thought much about it. Turns out that "the cloud" is a giant blight on the environment.

Power, Pollution and the Internet

Most data centers [aka the physical homes of "the cloud"], by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner...Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid...To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters. Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, [and]...data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers. 

So like, the more I blog, the more we all die? That's...not good at all. Sorry about that, folks!

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Day 4: complete. It's Friday. Yay.