I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like the article.
I believe there is a fundamental difference between data centers and other electrical appliances because data centers consume energy 24/7/365, while electrical appliances do not.
It is a well known fact that electricity consumption from other sources, like heating or cooling buildings is much larger in comparison. Or even data networks and internet traffic in general; https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-... And there is a lot to do in those fields as well.
Unfortunately, renewables to overtake fossile are far away. Even with the development the last decade, wind and solar still count for only a fraction of world production; https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019) Until then, we as developers can actually make a small contribution by offsetting getting the consumption from this particular source higher than it is today, even if number of data centers is exponentially increasing.
Hope you found some of the other articles insightful.
I'm not sure which part of it you believe is unreal, but I'll try to clarify;
- the 1% electricity consumption of total world consumption is real - based on research done by IEA (https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-...)
- The calculation on the effect of generating 200TWh of electricity from burning coal is 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 emission is real - the link in the article points to the estimation
- the fact that most of world's energy comes from fossile sources is real. While it's not 100% from coal, 67% is from fossile fuels; https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019
I don't really believe the suggestions conflict with cloud provider motives. If all cloud customers reduce their workload requirements, it's actually a win for the cloud provider as well. Because they are then able to put more customers on less hardware. Then they pay less money for electricity and pay less money on hardware investments. This is just a repeat of the virtualization / Dockerization of workloads, just on much higher scale.
If you read the very last paragraph, I actually propose increased efficiency on software level as a way to lower energy consumption. The two other (component and data center level) are things us as developers usually have little or no control over, they were merely used to illustrate that the industry as a whole is working on the problem, and that you as a developer actually can contribute.
I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like the article. I believe there is a fundamental difference between data centers and other electrical appliances because data centers consume energy 24/7/365, while electrical appliances do not.
It is a well known fact that electricity consumption from other sources, like heating or cooling buildings is much larger in comparison. Or even data networks and internet traffic in general; https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-... And there is a lot to do in those fields as well.
Unfortunately, renewables to overtake fossile are far away. Even with the development the last decade, wind and solar still count for only a fraction of world production; https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-2019) Until then, we as developers can actually make a small contribution by offsetting getting the consumption from this particular source higher than it is today, even if number of data centers is exponentially increasing.
Hope you found some of the other articles insightful.