[mrchrisadams]

This isn't a post about using EC2 using too much power.

Energy and emissions aren't the same thing.

You can have an efficient datacentre that still emits CO2 because it's powered by coal.

Conversely you can have a less efficient datacentre that runs on geothermal, that will have vastly lower CO2 emissions.

If you want to decouple the nice things we talk about on here (PaaS, IaaS and suchlike) from the bad things (climate change, pollution from burning tonnes of coal etc. ), then finding away to generate power without releasing loads of CO2 helps.

Tom Raftery has a nice slideshare outlining some of the issues here - if you've made this far to read the comments, it's worth skimming over it.

http://www.slideshare.net/TomRaftery/can-we-hack-open-source...