Re:Home servers are greener than cloud
by moron4hire on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:50PM
(#21589496)
That said, I'd love a "solar powered Raspberry Pi in a box" product to just buy and setup in my backyard somewhere for my personal website.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. DCs are frequently powered by solar (https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/, https://sustainability.fb.com/innovation-for-our-world/susta...), and this article gives no actual evidence other than home server being able to run on 10W. Solar and Wind projects are successful in part because of economies of scale. While local-scale grids may be great, using them to power services that run on cloud infrastructure today don't seem like a wonderful application.
I have no doubt that the aggregate sum of my all of my cloud usage across Google, FB, Amazon, etc. amounts to larger than 10W, but if you summed up all of the different pieces of those services that I use, I doubt you'd ever be able to scale them all down to something that could run at home, forget doing it on 10W. There may be a small sliver of that which is possible (e.g. EMail), but the fact of the matter is that it's almost irrelevant.
Coincidentally, the author of this post maintains a project that develops a home server system, which means there's plenty of vested interest in pushing this non-analysis.