GreenScroll: Power the Internet by Renewable Energy
Surfing the web may seem like a harmless act, but amount of energy required to run each any every website we visit is massive. There are hundreds of millions of websites currently active that all require some type of web server to run off of. It is estimated that a company of the size of Google has nearly a 1/2 million web servers. Just imagine how much energy and hardware that is required to run an operation of that size.
The web is now a staple in our lives and only continues to grow daily, so reducing the amount of servers or energy does not seem probable. There are ways to reduce the amount of energy required by servers through the use of cloud computing initiatives and virtualization, but you can only reduce the amount of energy so much. There are also green web hosting companies that run their servers on renewable energy to help reduce the impact of your web site. That also works, but not all green hosting companies cover their entire operation’s carbon footprint regardless of the claims they make.
This leads me to a non-profit organization I found called GreenScroll that helps fill the void for those who want to help reduce the carbon footprint that the Internet leaves. This means that you can keep your web hosting service and use GreenScroll to ensure that your website is carbon neutral.
How Does it Work?
Depending on the size of your website, you can make a fairly small pledge that will go towards purchasing renewable energy credits. As GreenScroll grows, they plan on contributing to more and more green energy projects to allow contributors to know where their pledges are going to. They seem really open to allowing their community of contributors being involved in the efforts they are undertaking.
At the moment, their operations are fairly small as they just started at the beginning of 2009. The company hopes to continue to grown to allow more and more people make the Internet as carbon neutral as possible. As I mentioned above, this is a non-profit company and the only benefit they are getting is to see more and more webmasters go carbon neutral. This site is worth checking to make ensure that your website is carbon neutral.
Yes the internet does use a lot of energy. I remember reading some stat about how much energy is required for a simple thing like a Google search. It was quite surprising. Unfortunately I don’t think too many people will be rushing to buy energy credits.
Wonderful post! We think about all the obvious ways to save energy but sometimes it’s the not-so-obvious things that can make a huge difference. Thanks for opening our eyes to one of them!
That’s great Patrick, thanks!
John
@greenscroll
Amazing i was really unknown about such web hosing companies which are based on green renewable energy.
Hey,
Id never thought of it in this way! I guess when you add to the fact that BILLIONS of people are surfing the net, the amount of energy being used is massive. maybe if people did more online shopping (for groceries etc) they could save on a car gas bill and help stay green that way as well…
Whoa, that’s crazy how much power is required to run big companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
-Jack