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A comment on How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web more energy efficient?. Parent comment

Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by kortilla on Friday September 18, 2020 @05:40AM (#24514777)
No, that won’t help. Even a 25% gain in all things Internet (which is almost certainly a fantasy) is only 2.5% of global usage in your worst case scenario. That’s outpaced by growth so spending the effort instead on more rapidly rolling out solar/wind and replacing 5% of generation goes much further and can’t be undone by a software update with a new GIF feature that sucks power.
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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by gmueckl on Friday September 18, 2020 @06:34AM (#24515054)
So you'd rather have others contribute 5% than working yourself on getting these other 2.5% that you can do something about?

Btw, given the inherent thermodynamic inefficiencies in active datacenter cooling I'd be surprised if we can't do better than 25%.

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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by Arcuru on Friday September 18, 2020 @12:16PM (#24518647)
The total overhead, including cooling, is only ~10% for Google datacenters [0], and the other cloud providers are likely similar. Efficiency gains of that scale probably need to come from somewhere else.

[0] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency

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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by kortilla on Monday September 21, 2020 @03:17PM (#24547277)
Yes, the 2.5% number is best case for a complete upheaval of how things work right now. That’s a waste of effort societally speaking when literally 100% of electric generation can be replaced with renewable energy.
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Re:How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web mo... by stuaxo on Friday September 18, 2020 @05:50AM (#24514830)
That's a big number and we can do both. Many peoples skills here are more suited to improving internet power usage vs helping roll out wind and solar.
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