Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 130

whose disposal raises serious issues of water and soil contamination.
There are few more arresting images than those in Edward Burtynsky's
documentary Manufactured Landscapes of elderly village women in China
picking through mountains of hazardous computer waste for something
to sell. This scene, repeated again and again throughout the many places
where detritus from the cloud inds a not-so-inal resting place, belies the
image of an immaterial information age. Admittedly, this problem does
not make for the dystopian drama of nuclear-waste disposal, a reality that
has itself slowed the development of nuclear power by providing political
ballast for its foes. Moreover, the mushroom cloud associated with nuclear
weapons is a far more arresting deterrent than the puffy clouds of our
information age. But in some respects, the challenge of the cloud's e-waste
is more insidious because its hazards are not so immediately threatening
and because the bulk of the damage is done in poor countries, where
most such waste is dumped, or in the poorer regions of richer nations,
such as in rural China.
The need to keep the heart of the data center beating requires a con-
stant stream of power. As a result, the facilities need reliable sources of
electricity for their 24/7 operations and, for those times when even the
best electrical systems shut down, backup systems, including the diesel-
powered generators described in the Microsoft story. Furthermore, in
most cases, additional backup is provided by a massive supply of lead-acid
batteries and banks of lywheels whose spinning offers additional reserve
power. Even with all of this expensive, polluting backup, there is still
no guarantee of 24/7 performance, as Microsoft itself learned when it
experienced a worldwide crash of several major cloud services because it
failed to renew a security certiicate in 2013 (Ribeiro 2013).
The need for reliable, low-cost electricity for both power and cooling
is a complicated coupling that inluences locational decisions and helps to
shape the politics of data centers. The power demands alone are astound-
ing. As an engineer who has designed hundreds of the centers described,
“It's staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand
the numbers, the sheer size of these systems. A single data center can take
more power than a medium-size town” (Glanz 2012b). Estimates vary, but
experts agree that data centers' power consumption accounts for roughly
2 percent of all the electricity consumed in the world, and their carbon
emissions are set to quadruple by 2020 ( Data Center Journal 2013).