One of the benefits touted by Cloud Computing advocates is that besides monetary gains through economies of scale, there are also benefits for the environment.
Came across an article by Reuven Cohen, a cloud computing evangelist, that tries to quantify just how green the cloud is. Data seems hard to obtain at this moment, it seems.
One interesting anecdote is that apparently a city in Finland uses generated energy from data centers to heat homes.
Intuitively there's a ring of truth but it's so very important to have numbers to back it up.
James Urquhart, a CNET columnist, commented on Cohen's article with some optimism.
"So, in a sense, the 'greenness' of cloud computing is a kind of Schroedinger's box problem today, in which we won't know the actual savings to the environment until someone actually observes--or measures--it," he remarked.
It would be great if Amazon or another cloud provider publishes a bit of data.