Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 132

Duke Power, with a notorious environmental and labor record, Apple has
taken some steps to develop sources of renewable energy (Clancy 2012).
Finally, Salesforce has developed new metrics, including carbon produced
per transaction, to better monitor its energy use (Makower 2012).
Even if companies manage to increase renewable energy sources for
cloud data centers, signiicant environmental problems will remain. That
is because most people access cloud systems wirelessly, and, as a 2013
report concluded, wireless access consumes enormous amounts of energy
and does so less eficiently than the data centers that have come in for
most criticism (Center for Energy-Eficient Telecommunications 2013).
Moreover, it is important to observe that most of the green shoots in an
otherwise bleak landscape sprout within the United States. There are
exceptions. Greenpeace named the giant Indian technology outsourcing
company Wipro the greenest electronics company in the world (Swinhoe
2013). However, the material construction of cloud computing requires
global supply chains whose many links outside the United States give rise to
daily stories of environmental ruin. So even as Apple was trying to burnish
its reputation for producing solar power in North Carolina's coal country,
one of its suppliers in China was discovered to have killed a river outside
Shanghai with e-waste resulting from the production of Apple products.
According to an account in the Financial Times , the Apple contractor has
been turning the river a milky white just about every week over the two
years it has run the industrial park facility, prompting this comment from
one waste-treatment plant worker: “Before that, there were ish and shell-
ish in the river that we used to eat. But now there are no ish at all. And
when the water turns white, we can't even use it to water the vegetables
any more” (Mishkin, Waldmeir, and Hille 2013). The local company is
facing sanctions from the Shanghai government, but it is unlikely that the
river can be brought back to life. Stories like this provide an important
reminder that the cloud is grounded in a global system of production that
is material, industrial, and, unless there are major changes, unsustainable.
One result of the “always-on” commitment is that server operation is
woefully ineficient. When the New York Times commissioned McKin-
sey and Company to examine the energy use of data centers providing
cloud services to a variety of customers, it found that they were using
only between 6 and 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers
to perform actual processing operations (Glanz 2012b). Companies keep