Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list, With the help of Juliet Barbara and Gregory Varnum, we now have detailed public figures regarding the energy use and energy sources of the Wikimedia servers: As of May 2016, the servers use 222 kW, summing up to about 2 GWh of electrical energy per year. For more information, please see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact.
The next step would be to figure out the cost and feasibility of having the servers run on 100% renewable energy. I'd appreciate it if someone could help me find out how this works. As a European consumer, I can order renewable energy for my house simply by calling my energy company on the phone, with the price difference being negligible. I assume it is not just as easy in our case, right? Thank you, Lukas 2016-03-31 0:47 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher <[email protected]>: > Thanks Tim for clarifying. > > On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Tim Starling <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > On 31/03/16 02:55, Katherine Maher wrote: > > > IIRC, we included clean energy consumption as a factor in > > > evaluating in our RFC for our choice of a backup colo a few years back > > > > Since I strongly support emissions reduction, on my own initiative I > > did an analysis of expected CO2 emissions of each of the candidate > > facilities during the selection process of the backup colo. That's > > presumably what you're referring to. > > > > < > > > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1adt45Msw2o8Ml0s8S0USm9QLkW9ER3xCPkU9d2NJS4Y/edit#gid=0 > > > > > > > My conclusion was that codfw (the winner) was one of the worst > > candidates for CO2 emissions. However, the price they were offering > > was so much lower than the other candidates that I could not make a > > rational case for removing it as an option. You could buy high-quality > > offsets for our total emissions for much less than the price difference. > > > > However, this observation does require us to actually purchase said > > offsets, if codfw is to be represented as an ethical choice, and that > > was never done. > > > > codfw would not tell us their PUE, apparently because it was a > > near-empty facility and so it would have technically been a very large > > number. I thought it would be fair to account for marginal emissions > > assuming a projected higher occupancy rate and entered 2.9 for them, > > following a publication which gave that figure as an industry average. > > It's a new facility, but it's not likely that they achieved an > > industry-leading PUE since the climate in Dallas is not suitable for > > evaporative cooling or "free" cooling. > > > > > Ops runs a tight ship, and we're a relatively small footprint in our > > colos, > > > so we don't necessarily have the ability to drive purchasing decisions > > > based on scale alone. > > > > I think it's stretching the metaphor to call ops a "tight ship". We > > could switch off spare servers in codfw for a substantial power > > saving, in exchange for a ~10 minute penalty in failover time. But it > > would probably cost a week or two of engineer time to set up suitable > > automation for failover and periodic updates. > > > > Or we could have avoided a hot spare colo altogether, with smarter > > disaster recovery plans, as I argued at the time. My idea wasn't > > popular: Leslie Carr said she would not want to work for an > > organisation that adopted the relaxed DR restoration time targets that > > I advocated. And of course DR improvements were touted many times as > > an effective use of donor funds. > > > > Certainly you have a point about scale. Server hardware has extremely > > rudimentary power management -- for example when I checked a couple of > > years ago, none of our servers supported suspend-to-RAM, and idle > > power usage hardly differed from power usage at typical load. So the > > only option for reducing power usage of temporarily unused servers is > > powering off, and powering back on via out-of-band management. WMF > > presumably has little influence with motherboard suppliers. But we > > could at least include power management and efficiency as > > consideratons when we evaluate new hardware purchases. > > > > > At the time the report came out, we started talking to Lukas about how > we > > > could improve our efforts at the WMF and across the movement, but we've > > had > > > limited bandwidth to move this forward in the Foundation (and some > > > transitions in our Finance and Operations leadership, who were acting > as > > > executive sponsors). However, I think it's safe to say that we'd like > to > > > continue to reduce our environmental impact, and look forward to the > > > findings of this effort. > > > > We could at least offset our datacentre power usage, that would be > > cheap and effective. > > > > -- Tim Starling > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > > > -- > Katherine Maher > > Wikimedia Foundation > 149 New Montgomery Street > San Francisco, CA 94105 > > +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 > +1 (415) 712 4873 > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
