I was recently at a conference for AWS (Amazon Web Services, AKA the cloud provider for a HUGE chunk of the internet), and part of the keynote claimed that it was greener to run in the cloud because... uh... well, they didn't exactly say. Don't get me wrong, I could see how it would be easier to make all AWS data centers compliant with using green energy than it would be to convince every random financial institution that their on-premises servers need to be green, but quite frankly it's Amazon and I don't trust that they're telling the truth about themselves and not just greenwashing.

Quite frankly, for things like lemmy instances, I think we could totally achieve a totally solar powered setup easily... but not easily at scale or reliably.

I've thought about how cool it would be to have a server room linked up with a solar array and batteries, and basically only have the servers up when there's enough energy to power them. In theory, it sounds fun to have a static splash page that shows when the servers are down that explains why they're down, as a way to make people think about how energy-expensive servers are. In practice, it sounds like a nightmare for a ton of reasons to have an intentionally flaky server. But it sounds like this is already a Thing with Low-tech magazine, which is neat!

But that's not to say we couldn't build and self-host a reliable and sustainable server room. Just that I don't know the numbers on what a server room actually pulls energy wise and how much energy generation we'd need.