Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A ton of oil shale a month to keep a server running?

In Estonia we make our electricity from oil shale. Which is a rather un-environmental technology and probably (and hopefully) we will stop using it due to EU CO2 quota politics in a few decades.

I calculated that to keep one server in a server room running we need to burn about a ton of oil shale a month in our power plants. That is a rather shocking figure and puts things into a different perspective for me.

I think that if the power companies would print on our electricity bills also the amount of resources used we would switch off unnecessary equipment more often.

The calculation:
- Server uses about 0,5kW
- Because of cooling and UPS-s the figure should be doubled so we need 1kW for one server.
- For one kWh we burn about 1,5kg of oil shale.
- There are 744 hours in one month so we get: 744h x 1 kWh x 1,5kg= 1116kg/month