Green Tech

It has been hot in Philly. Not the kind of hot where you slip on some shorts and sandals and make your way into the long absent sun after a cold, cloudy winter (love that kind of hot). No, this is the kind of hot where you stay as still as possible for fear of bursting into a terminal sweat. It is the kind of hot that feels like a damp, grizzly bear, fresh from some kind of long, sweaty, ursine 10k, is hugging you tightly for 24 hours a day. It is the kind of thick, wet hot that makes a walk to the store feel like 20 breaststroke laps in a bowl of steaming gravy.

Sure, some of you Southerners will claim that I don’t know hot, but I’ve been down South, and at least there you get an afternoon rain, a torrential cooling. Or, if you are reporting in from the desert, at least your heat is dry. Sure, it may be a cliche’ but dry heat is more comfortable. The air in Philly feels like rain that has boiled just before it hit the ground. It feels like a neck deep swamp.

But, I am not here to brag about Philly’s extremes of discomfort. This post is not meant to be a competitive statement. I am simply hoping to frame a question in the appropriate sticky, stinky, sweaty context.

This heat, similar (I imagine) to being inside a beached whale in Death Valley, leads Philadelphians to that predictable technological response . . . air conditioning. The hum of AC units becomes a part of the summer sound-scape, blending perfectly with the constant whining of those caught outside and the gentle sizzle of pigeons cooking on the blacktop. The light drizzle from thousands of window units falls gently on the pedestrians in the streets, and each store front doorway blasts welcoming cold on passerbys. Interior climate control is the sweet breath of modern civilization, but at what cost?

Air conditioning is definitely a significant sucker of electricity and it seems to be used with a kind of reckless abandon. It flows out open doors and windows. It runs 24 hours a day. Despite the increasingly prohibitive cost, nearly everyone seems to use it and use it and use it. Is this caused by  a loss of climate acclimation? Have we forgotten how to exist in the heat? Is it made worse by a lack of alternatives? How did we stay cool before AC and what will we do when the environmental cost of its use becomes too heavy to pay?

Chad is working on some alternatives for the 100k house, and I thought we would try to get a discussion started here as well. How much energy do we waste conditioning our air? What are the alternatives to AC? Is it possible to survive in Philly (or elsewhere) without it? If so, is it possible to be comfortable?

Talk it up in the comments.

Nic Darling actually enjoys this hot, stick weather. He is obviously a witch and will be burned accordingly.

According to a post by Bits, the New York Times tech blog, air travel might lose its top billing in the polluters’ revue. Moving up the marquee to headline the greenhouse gas show . . . data centers. That’s right, buildings full of humming computers and spinning hard drives, cooled by the constant flow of conditioned air, are sucking enough energy to set them on a path for carbon emission stardom by 2020. As much as our move away from paper might have helped, we now have to wonder whether the electronic, binary alternative is a real improvement.

Data Centers require a great deal of energy to store all that information (blogs to financials, emails to images). However, unsurprisingly, inefficiency is the greatest portion of the problem. Most servers use relatively little of the drive space available to them, but their energy use is the same regardless of capacity. It is like driving an SUV with only one person in it. Without this inefficient use of space, data centers might be able to avoid supplanting the air travel giants.

Much like we have discussed, the challenge is to make efficiency tangible. There is currently, according to Bits, a proposal for a standardized efficiency rating for data centers. This is the kind of thing we need to see across the board. Numerical, understandable representations of efficiency and conservation. If one can judge a data center’s efficiency at a glance, on can more easily make the choice to improve conditions at a current location before opening another center to add to the width of information’s giant foot.

Any techies out there want to offer some insight or hope on this issue? Is it possible to make data centers sustainable in a low energy future? Talk about it in the comments.

Nic Darling is the marketing guy for a data backup software company. This will occasionally bleed into his guest blogging.