Talking About Green

Green hosting has come a
long way since only five years ago. In 2005, there were only a few
green hosting
providers, and the concept, though embraced by those who had
particular concern for the environment, was not widely accepted. Now
there are dozens of green hosts, and recent studies are highlighting
the need for the major players like Facebook, Google and Microsoft to
increase their investment in green data centers. The combination of
green web hosting, the spread of cloud computing and these new studies
has led to a rising debate about the cloud and its affect on the
environment.

Several new studies have been
released claiming that the aggregate emissions of all web servers
around the world will contain as much carbon as the entire airline
industry by 2020. Talk about bad company! To counteract this trend,
pressure is growing on the biggest carbon polluters on the web to go
green a little quicker than they have been to this point. Microsoft
has just been embarrassed by new information that their largest data
center, in Oregon, is fed by coal-fired power plants. When confronted,
they’ve responded that they have several green data centers and
use renewable energy in many other operations. They also say that
their cloud hosting model is green because it requires less servers to
host the same number of users than a dedicated server farm. The facts
are certainly true, but does this make them green?

The problem with referring to this type of savings as
“green” is that it can be used to make the claim that,
“well, we’re already green. After all, we use the
cloud.” However, this terminology is incorrect, at least in
today’s vernacular. “Green” means that you not only
take special care to minimize your impact on the environment, but that
you also get your energy from renewable sources. To this point, many
of the large clouds don’t do that, so it stands to reason that
they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with calling themselves
green.

Why does this matter? Because terminology
affects the way we think. If “green” means,
“we’re saving energy,” everyone’s green who
uses the energy-saving mode on their dishwasher. If we lower the
“green” threshold too far, it will make it more difficult
for us to push these giant corporations and giant carbon emitters to
do more to minimize their environmental footprint.

The good news is that companies such as AISO are building data centers which
use 100% renewable energy, (solar, in this case,) and creating green
clouds, which either use 100% renewable energy or buy carbon credits
to offset their energy use. If this practice becomes more widespread,
it might put sufficient pressure on the big boys to cause them to
adopt the green cloud themselves.