Big Data's Dark Side: A Massive, Polluting Drain on the Nation's
Power Supply  The Citizen's Guide to the Future Sept. 24 2012
10:47 AM   Data servers Google computing centers in The Dalles,
Oregon, are each the size of a football field.  Photo by Craig
Mitchelldyer/Getty Images  The New York Times this weekend had
part one of an in-depth investigation into the environmental
impacts of the Internet, and the findings are not pretty. The
data centers that store and process everything from your old
emails and Facebook data to tweets, Google searches, and
e-commerce transactions suck up 2 percent of the nation's entire
electricity supply. That's actually more than the notoriously
energy-intensive paper industry, belying the myth that a shift
to digital information is necessarily better for the planet.
Will Oremus Will Oremus   Worse, upwards of 90 percent of that
energy is simply wasted. A McKinsey & Company report found that
the average data center uses just 6 to 12 percent of its
electricity for actual computa