Dr. Denisa Constantinescu was interviewed for an article in Swiss research magazine Horizons.
Ecological and economic incentives are often not aligned
Denisa Constantinescu at EPFL is studying when a computer centre should renew its technical infrastructure with advanced models that are less economically and ecologically greedy. “In Switzerland, electricity is quite expensive, which encourages changing chips after less than four years”, she says. As electricity production is more than 95 percent free of direct CO2 emissions, however, there is relatively little climate benefit in reducing energy needs”. The situation is reversed in China where electricity is cheap, though its average carbon intensity is ten times higher than in Switzerland. Economically, the advantage lies in changing hardware only every seven years. If it were done so two years earlier, however, related CO2 emissions would decrease by 98 percent. “This is the fundamental problem: ecological and economic incentives are often not aligned”.
