Lightning strikes cause outage at the cloud computer centers near Dublin Ireland. Amazon and Microsoft services where affected.
“The transient electric deviation caused by the explosion was large enough that it propagated to a portion of the phase control system that synchronizes the backup generator plant, disabling some of them.”
Even though efficiency in datacenters has improved in recent years, it’s still a long way off what it could be. Computers and internet contribute the same amount of emissions as air travel (2%). Maybe the cloud could be married with the waves, because one thing Ireland has en abundance of is wave energy. Recently Microsoft suggested local servers for the Cloud to save energy because the waste heat would be generated in homes. Computing generates only hear ultimately, so a 30 KW rack is quite a heating appliance. It seems that the cloud has been an attempt to comoditize ccomputing and serving power, more than a smart idea. The real clouds don’t like it either.
"We propose to replace electric resistive heating elements with silicon heating elements (computers), thereby reducing societal
energy footprint by using electricity for heating to also perform computation."