Cloud and Environmentalism

I recently read a blog post by Reuven Cohen regarding the environmental impact of cloud computing. As an answer to his question regarding cloud's impact on the environment, we can safely say that, all else being equal, making use of cloud computing in an existing data center has a smaller environmental impact (i.e., CO2 emissions) than building a brand new data center in which to house your server and applications (whether it would be a private cloud or not). However, my statement requires some explanation: when I say 'cloud' I mean making use of resources in the cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, storage).

Greenpeace, however, does not distinguish between 'cloud computing' and everything on the Internet in its report entitled, "Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change". In their defence, they do identify growing (indirect) use of cloud resources by consumers of social media applications (Facebook), storage (Flikr), SaaS (Google Apps), etc. However the analysis includes all network infrastructure required to operate the Internet (!) as well as the specific cloud infrastructure used to provide these services.

On the other hand, the point that Greenpeace is trying to make is that the growth of usage of cloud based services will require the buildout of additional capacity in square footage, infrastructure, and power consumption. The building of the facilities and infrastructure is a sunk carbon cost (which might be subject to energetic efficiencies in and of itself) but the generation of power required by such a facility is variable and forecast to increase over the foreseeable future.

Adapted from, "Make IT Green: Cloud Comuting and its Contribution to Climate Change", Greenpeace International, March, 2010.

Such power generation is largely by coal fired and nuclear plants. Therein lies the problem. Interestingly, while CO2 emissions associated to power consumption increases across the board for the various regions between 2007 and 2020, their relative percentage decreases for all except one, China, whose emissions by far exceed those of the other regions largely due to its reliance on coal for power generation.

The bottom line in Greenpeace's report is that our use of cloud based services will inevitably increase over the coming years and that the carbon footprint of the organizations that provide us these services will inevitably get bigger. By making use of these services, we become polluters by proxy. It behooves us to apply pressure to those organizations that provide us these services, and to lobby our local, state/provincial, and federal governments to take notice of this issue; they are the ones who can force real change by enacting legislation.

The case has been made that cloud based services can deliver economic benefits to organizations, but those benefits, and the overall economic growth that can result, should be leveraged to find a more sustainable way of delivering these services.