[bloody-crow]

> I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now. However, it's likely that a world in which there is one server per household or per street would be more electrically efficient than the current world of billionaire cloud servers.

This is the core of the article and it's basically guesswork. From all I read, I tend to believe the opposite actually. Cloud is a lot greener than home servers.

[antisthenes]

Even just applying the basic principles of efficiencies of scale, it's almost guaranteed to be true that cloud is greener.

Utility scale power, utility scale chip production, exabyte-scale storage racks, generally more efficient chips (xeons vs desktop models), more efficient server PSUs.

Not to mention less overhead like deliveries. You only need 1 truck to deliver the hardware to the data center, whereas you might need 30-50-100 to deliver computers to individual households.

> But given that a home server can run on 10W of electrical power, and potentially off of a solar panel I found this unpersuasive. I didn't have any quantitative estimates then, and still don't now.

This is laughable. It's not an argument for individual servers in households, if anything, it's an argument for utility-scale solar and more efficient software that runs efficiently on 10W CPUs.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

And all that for running utility scale software bloat somewhere else, requiring networking infrastructure because the data isn't where it belongs. Talk about gridlock, and hick-ups because some backhoe or fat fingered admin tested the reliability of the the redundancy. As can be seen again and again when all sorts of services degrade or fail globally because some cloud experienced lightning. Instead of a single household, block, or city.

Yah, sure!

[verdverm]

If you use the Google Cloud, they run on 100% renewables