/ How green is your space?

Some may believe goign virtual would obviously mean going green. Atleast I did think so.
But I found this interesting blog that would beg to differ.

Server Rooms and the Future of Humanism

"Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry," New Scientist reports.

One server alone, we read, has the "same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."Note, meanwhile, that I have not independently verified these numbers; I am simply repeating someone else's claims. As Money explained last summer, these "server farms" and "data centers" can each use up to "a small city's worth of electricity" – and most of that electricity goes toward "cranking up the air conditioning to make sure the computers don't literally melt themselves into slag."Returning to New Scientist, we read that, "with more than 1 million computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry."

So what to do? Do we make our server farms hydroelectric? It's already happening. Do we make them wind-powered? Already happening. Do we go solar? That's happening, too. As Business 2.0 wrote back in October: "Massive data centers are vital to the economy. They are also notorious power hogs. If their numbers keep growing at the expected rate, the United States alone will need nearly a dozen new power plants by 2011 just to keep the data flowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency." And so we read:
That's why a small server-farm company called AISO.net (for "affordable Internet services online") has gone completely off the grid. Located 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the desert hamlet of Romoland, AISO.net has flanked its 2,000-square-foot building with two banks of ground-mounted solar panels, which generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Batteries store the juice for nighttime operation.However, couldn't we also just store less information, save two or three – or four – hundred fewer emails, stop being mouse potatoes and go outside for a walk, leaving our servers turned off in the darkness?Sure – or we could build our server farms in Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric power is easy enough to find.
In any case, I can't help but wonder if the ecological effects of this archival instinct to preserve the past at any cost – whether we store something inside air conditioned warehouses full of books that no one wants, or in the well-lit galleries of potentially unnecessary new museums, or even out on server farms somewhere in the rainy hills of Oregon – are really worth it. And I can't help but suggest that they're not – even if that means I'll no longer have a place to save BLDGBLOG.But we are making the earth unearthly, through the knock-on effects of global climate change, in order that we might hold onto the human past for another generation – reading old books, preserving films, saving emails.
So is the anthropological project of preserving ourselves really worth its environmental effects? Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it'll have lots of really great archives...? Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise?- http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/server-rooms-and-future-of-humanism.html

There is some food for thought.

Another interesting piece on the amount of energy consumed by avatars

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
December 05, 2006
Tony Walsh has, as others do, some doubts about whether Second Life is sustainable as a business. But he also poses another question that I hadn't come across before: "Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?"
He quotes Philip Rosedale, the head of Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world: "We're running at full power all the time, so we consume an enormous amount of electrical power in co-location facilities [where they house their 4,000 server computers] ... We're running out of power for the square feet of rack space that we've got machines in. We can't for example use [blade] servers right now because they would simply require more electricity than you could get for the floor space they occupy."
Walsh notes that on average there are between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars in Second Life at any given time, a number that's growing rapidly. He wonders: "How much power do 15,000 human beings consume daily compared to 15,000 avatars?" Hmm. That's an interesting question.
So let's do the math.
If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:
(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours
Per capita, that's:
60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh
Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.
Now, if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do.
More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.
Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints.- http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php

Hmmm this is defintely (not) helping me decide if i like or hate Second Life.
I really am trying to like it.
FOr REAL.