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Comment by floating-io | Hacker News Reader

Things like this actually bother me. They make it seem like the only way to be energy efficient is to give up all amenities, including aesthetics.

This is not the way to promote energy efficiency IMO.

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The part that bothers me a bit is that the website doesn’t actually do anything useful - there isn’t really any content. I guess one could argue that the proof of concept of a solar powered server is interesting enough to justify the site’s existence - but Low Tech Magazine has already had a solar-powered version for years AND they actually host interesting content.

If someone hosts a solar-powered website that doesn’t do anything useful, is that really helping the environment? Or is it just contributing to e-waste when the parts eventually fail? And does it really have a smaller environmental footprint than just hosting a site at Neocities or something?

That being said I recognize that this is just someone’s little hobby project, and they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like. My comments are more directed at a general tendency of techies to engage consumerism under the guise of environmentalism.

The horror of someone making something for fun!

As I said, “they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like”.

But if they are going to imply that this is more environmentally friendly than hosting a site in a data center…

> Data centers and servers traditionally consume large amounts of data [I assume they mean energy?]. But this lightweight solar powered website relies only on energy from the sun.

… then I think it is fair game to examine those claims.

In all likelihood, I'd say their claims are right-ish. The caveats are:

* has their PV cell been made in such a way as to ever reclaim its embodied energy? Smaller panels tend not to achieve this over their lifetimes, larger ones do. * data centres _where_? If we are talking data centres that feed heat into a district heating system as part of its cooling, then probably not. Free cooled or air conditioned systems probably lose, though.

There's also the matter of designing for a limited medium: over time there's a (very difficult to quantify) carbon saving from serving a site that is small and cacheable vs running some monster SPA with a RoR back end. Think computation-per-request

So.. maybe? It is an apples and apples comparison, but we're not specifying which kind clearly enough.

I’m assuming static content hosted on some serverless architecture (so you’re not reserving CPU cycles when nobody is actually using the site), where the host is able to optimize things pretty heavily.

I’m also assuming that the data center gets a significant amount of their energy from renewable sources. Google, for example, offsets 100% of their energy usage with renewable energy. [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/

Probably good, but again, heat reclamation vs free cooling vs AC also matters. In terms of environmental impact, where the heat goes is of enormous consequence. If Google are using AC, they're raising energy demand and therefore lengthening the road to decarbonisation. If they are using free cooling, that's sort of OK. If they're pumping heat to people's houses, that's fantastic as it displaces their heat demands.

No dispute here that economies of scale apply on the compute side.