How effective are carbon credits at eliminating footprint? If company X runs an efficient datacenter with 80 GW wind and 20 GW coal power, and company Y runs a dumpy datacenter with 200 GW coal power, but company Y buys 200 credits, is company X still the one doing the most harm?
For now, company Y is probably doing better (purely from a CO2 emissions standpoint). But it's not sustainable, because some of those credits are from companies that just reduced their usage below some threshold. Most of the credits are not from "negative emissions" like planting trees. So as the thresholds decrease over time, there will be fewer credits available to buy and they will be stuck with either really expensive credits or a surplus of CO12 generation.
It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind. Data centers are all grid connected, so what really matters is the composition of generators on the grid (or at least the composition on the generators near the datacenter).
> It's much more complex than this. You can't run a data center on wind.
You certainly could run on it on a dedicated combination of any mix of wind/solar/hydro power and stored (e.g., battery or regenerative fuel cell) power you wanted to.
In practice, you'll probably want to connect it to the grid, but directed purchases on the grid, while they don't actually select which source really powers the DC, have all the practical effect of doing so.
