These servers are super cool but they really hammer home the limits of individual action on environmentalism. He's showing off one server that can suck back 8,000 watts. My apartment gets two phases of 120v at 100 amps, which is a total of 24,000 watts. Breakers are only rated for 80% of their capacity at continuous load, which means my house could handle at most two of these servers.
In more concrete terms, in my last Hydro bill we used about 1,500 kWh over two months. An 8,000 watt load would use that a little over a week.
And, of course, a data centre would have hundreds of these.
We know datacentres use a lot of power - the DoE estimates 2% of the United State's power goes to datacentres. But these numbers really hammer it home. By all means turn off the lights when you're not using them, but don't expect to save the planet that way
