You are right that our demand in bandwidth is comparably low, Ryan. But we do have an extremely strong brand, and the power of some really great people working and volunteering for Wikimedia. This is why I was hoping that someone could explain the technicalities of the U.S. energy system to me – can't we simply ask our datacenter providers to order renewable energy for our servers, maybe for an extra charge? This is what you can do in Europe, but I have a feeling things are not just as easy in the U.S. Thanks,
Lukas 2016-05-16 19:40 GMT+02:00 Ryan Lane <rlan...@gmail.com>: > On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 12:45 AM, Lukas Mezger <lukas.mez...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Yes, we're also looking into reducing the environmental impact of the > rest > > of the activities in the Wikimedia movement. And I am very aware that > many > > websites consume a lot more energy than Wikipedia does. (Please see > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact for more > > information.) > > > > But this doesn't mean we should not try to have the Wikimedia servers run > > on renewable energy. Even some big for-profit companies like Apple and > > Yahoo are already doing this. So, how can we get there as well and what > > would it cost us? > > > > > When you're as large as Apple or Yahoo, it's easy to pressure your > infrastructure providers to run on renewables. Wikimedia has basically no > bargaining power because they spend very little money (because they don't > run a lot of servers). I know Wikimedia feels huge and important, and it's > important in a lot of ways, but when it comes to pressuring datacenter > providers, it may as well not exist. > > It's possible that the only available option is to bring up new datacenters > in areas with renewable energy, and those datacenters may not be as > reliable, they may not be as well connected from a networking point of > view, they may have poor security and many other issues. I wouldn't expect > much movement towards renewables here until there's some really large > companies pushing for this in the relevant datacenters. > > - Ryan > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
