I recently read the “Actions for Environmental Justice from Autonomous and Community-Based Technological Infrastructures” report and wanted to continue the conversation here. If you are short on time and want to skip to the punchlines, go to page 75 of the PDF.
The study took a broad look at the issues from energy usage, energy generation, e-waste, and similar issues. Because it covered such a broad array of topics, it didn’t go into great detail about any one specific thing.
As an environmentalist, and someone who runs IT infrastructure for my local community, a series of things that stuck out to me were:
- Evaluate the possibility to set up autonomous, small-scale or locally-run data centers where feasible
- Explore containerization, virtualization and lightweight options for better common goods use
- Evaluate and choose data centers based on real sustainability commitments (e.g. location, transparency)
- Implement local renewable energy systems when feasible, but keep questioning this as a definitive solution, making visible how it can affect communities
This is because I run lightweight virtualization, on my small-scale, locally-run server room. It’s partially powered by solar panels (and would be entirely powered that way but we ran out of room for panels). We also have a battery backup which would keep systems going for at least 24 hours of a power outage (and we confirmed that our internet service does in fact stay up during a grid outage).
So yeah, these ones really hit home for me, quite literally.
An idea I’ve had for a while now is to have a small number of servers, perhaps just one rack that was powered entirely by renewable electricity. This means having batteries to keep things on when there’s no generation (no solar at night, possibly no wind). It also means generating significantly more energy than is needed sometimes (e.g. summer) so it’s possible to generate enough in low times (winter, cloudy, etc.). The same things applies to wind power, as it’s also intermittent.
There would also need to be some type of agreement on how to handle an extended shortage of generation. One option would be to issue a warning and have services need to be migrated to another location (e.g. a traditional data center).
An alternative would be to have the power grid as a backup. If needed, buy energy and perhaps buy carbon credits to atone for using fossil fuels (the majority of virtually all grid power is non-renewable and it’s not like you can tell the electrons from coal power where they need to flow). That could also help with the overabundance of power being generated sometimes, as instead of having that capacity be wasted, it could be sold to the grid and help reduce the need for those fossil fuels. There are trade offs either way.
To provide some concrete numbers, all the servers and networking gear in our rack consumes about 1kW. This means to be 100% renewable, we’d need to generate 24kWh of electricity per day. In July, we can do this even on a rainy day. In December, it is possible, but that only happened 5 days last December. It was also under 5kWh for 5 days in a row. The lowest was 1.8kWh. All of this is with a 17KW solar panel system.
Now, if we could partner with a sister 100% clean datacenter in the opposite hemisphere, that would change everything! Partnerships is also something mentioned in the aforementioned report.
I’m curious as to what fellow members and activists think of this. Two tiny data centers, that were community owned, running efficient IT systems, using hardware as long as possible and then making sure it gets repurposed by others or recycled in the worst case scenario. Little to no reliance on the power grid to keep things going. No water usage to keep machines cool like the big AI data centers reportedly have.
I also have ideas on how this could scale beyond just two data centers and have users not even notice when one of the centers go offline. I also have ideas on how this could be tested incrementally (as opposed to having to buy land, solar panels, inverters batteries, and so forth all up front). I also have ideas on how to help fund this (the short version of which is that there are a bunch of technology lovers who have servers in their basement who might be glad to have them run somewhere like this and pay a fee to cover operational costs of running the hardware). But if I include all the details on these ideas, this post will be as long as that 93 page report. 
So I’ll cut it off there.
What do you like about this? What doesn’t make sense or do you think wouldn’t work and why? If there were a pilot project to show this is not possible to run a sustainable IT infrastructure, do you think it could get funded (crowdfunded as a co-op, funded by grants, etc.)? Could there be enough groups interested in the mission that they’d be willing to pay even though they could get cheaper service from companies like AWS, Microsoft, or Google?