Should We Feel Guilty About Using the Cloud Now?

It’s getting harder and harder to find blameless activities these days.

For those of us who thought our online lives were fairly environmentally friendly â€" buying products on Amazon rather than driving to the store, streaming a movie on Netflix rather than buying or renting a physical disk with all its attendant packaging â€" this weekend’s New York Times story on data centers served as a rude reminder that all of this bit usage comes at a growing cost, and an increasingly dirty cost.

Data centers waste on average more than 90% of the energy they suck from the grid, the Times found, in research conducted with consultants at McKinsey. Worldwide, data centers use 30 billion watts, or as much power as 30 nuclear power stations â€" a number that is growing faster than ever.

Then there are the massive diesel generators these data centers are forced to keep running, just as backup power in case of the slightest outage. Each of them could power a mid-sized town by themselves. The fumes they’re spewing out night and day make these server farms some of the top polluters in Silicon Valley, and it’s hardly the only area where this is becoming an issue.

That product you bought on Amazon supports a company that was cited 24 times in north Virginia for running generators without even the most basic permit.

Right now, the problem is relatively small; data centers account for just 2% of total energy consumption in the U.S., according to one estimate. But it won’t stay that way for long. Internet storage and consumption is growing exponentially. Users added 1.8 trillion GB to the virtual world in 2011 alone, according to IDC.

That all has to be fed by new server farms. Not surprisingly, spending on cloud infrastructure has doubled to $4 trillion since 2005.

The scary part of this is that data centers are becoming a kind of shadow economy â€" hard to measure, utterly unchecked by any sort of oversight. Not only is there no government watchdog whatsoever for data centers, but the government can’t even tell you how much power it is sucking down for its own servers.

One thing the government can tell us: Earth just had the all-time warmest June-August land surface temperatures on record. Indeed, we haven’t had a below-average month since 1985.

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Ultimately, of course, these centers only exist to feed a consumer need. But that consumer need, in turn, is being fed by the notion of the cloud â€" which, if we think of it at all, sounds like an airy, magical place. It stores everything and delivers everything, and we don’t need to worry too much about how the sausage gets made. Right?

I’m certainly no saint when it comes to cloud usage. I’m a moderate to heavy user of Netflix, Hulu and HBO Go. I stream YouTube videos throughout the day, some of them not even related to “Gangnam Style.” I pay Apple to store nearly 25,000 songs and videos on servers somewhere so that I can download them on all my devices; for all I know, each song could be stored on its own server.

Well, not quite. But not far off, either: Part of the problem is that server design is massively inefficient, with each server designated to as small a task as possible to avoid unnecessary crashes.

And here’s the larger part of the problem: We’re not demanding anything better from our data providers. We’re demanding always-on, super-speedy service from the cloud, because we have no idea of the true cost. And the tech industry isn’t about to tell you.

“This is an industry dirty secret,” one top tech executive told the Times anonymously. “No one wants to be the first to say mea culpa.”

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It’s a shame that there isn’t more discussion of this problem because ultimately, we can do more than just feel guilty about it. Why? Because the fact is, not all server farms are created equal.

Exhibit A is Facebook, which set out to make its server farms as green as possible â€" and to pass on the secret of doing so to anyone that wanted it.

The social network gave this initiative a rather uninspiring name, the Open Compute Project. But the results have been hugely inspiring. Facebook’s first data center turned out to be 38% more efficient than the server farm it was previously leasing, at 24% of the cost.

The more companies we push to follow Facebook’s lead, the more we can reduce those massive redundancies in the cloud. We can have our digital cake and eat it too.