A message you leave on a social media goes to the electronic cloud, where it’s stored in a data center. Data centers gobble power. The 11 centers of Google alone require power enough to satisfy the needs of 260,000 homes.
Green energy couldn’t begin to do the job. The 500,000-square-foot data center Apple recently built in North Carolina, for example, would require 6.5 square miles of solar panels. That’s 2.5 miles on a side – with no trees or buildings to cast shadows. Since the data center lies in a densely populated region, such conditions are unrealistic.
For a suitable wind farm, even more space would be needed. Neither the sun nor the wind, you may have noticed, supplies power 24-7.
Data centers worldwide now consume 1.3 percent of all global electricity. In the next three years, Intel expects the number of devices connected to the Internet, including GPS-enabled locaters on shipping containers, to grow from the current 2.5 billion to – get this – 15 billion!
U.S. data centers alone soak up more than 40 times as much electricity as that supplied by all of America’s solar-energy projects. Anyone who thinks green energy is a viable alternative has his head in . . . well, the cloud.
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