Computer servers 'as bad' for climate as SUVs

Computer servers 'as bad' for climate as SUVs
14:29 03 December 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic

Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report.
Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.
"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has 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."
The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion 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.
The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.
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ageing electronics

From issue 2632 of New Scientist magazine, 02 December 2007, page 27

found on: technology.newscientist.com

Ageing may be as important to electronics as it is to good wine. A plastic transistor doubles its performance if simply left to sit at room temperature for a week.
Cheap to mould, pentacene transistors are a promising candidate for organic electronics. However, when they are being built, molecules can misalign to form defects, which trap electrons and slow the transistors down.
Now Wolfgang Kalb's team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has found that if a newly made pentacene transistor is left to sit in a vacuum, the defects disappear naturally (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.1457).
Self-healing typically requires heat, but in pentacene the "jostling" between molecules that occurs at room temperature is enough to realign the molecules and remove the defects.