The idea that cloud computing is green really depends on whom you’re talking to. Some say data center growth is driven by those evil cloud providers. They build huge, ugly structures that consume more power and water than a small town, take up a lot of real estate that could be used for farming, and really don’t employ that many people.
However, the data centers run by the major public cloud providers have a positive effect on power consumption for computing, generally speaking. Why? They operate at somewhere near 98 percent utilization for most of the physical hardware.
