Data Centers Pollute more than Airlines

Here's a twist:

"The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co." -nytimes

I think this is very interesting. As programmers we've been preaching about trading CPU cycles for programmer cycles. Meaning, why write efficient code (uses less servers for the same amount of process) when we can use higher level languages to write (less efficient) code.

These tiny tradeoffs become huge factors when scaled up.

At a $100 million per data center could they factor in solar cells?

eSolar describes its approach as a "market disrupting solar thermal power plant technology." Generation can be scaled from 25MW to over 500MW at energy prices competitive with traditional fossil fuels. The company, which ios based in Pasadena, Calif., intends to provide modular solar power plants that scale in increments of 25 megawatts.