Exergy consumption of cloud computing: A case study

Although information and communication technology (ICT) has been playing an important role in the development of business and society for more than thirty years, its potential benefits and risks for the environment are still not sufficiently explored. This is mainly because of the complex interdependencies between ICT and different other areas of business and society that together build a very complex ecosystem. In this paper, we present a holistic approach that treats ICT as a part of the global ecosystem. This approach combines datacentric methods that are typically used to analyze communication networks with widely applicable thermodynamic tools. The proposed approach is well suited to investigate complex heterogeneous systems and assess their environmental sustainability. In particular, we briefly present and discuss the application of such an approach on an exemplary model of cloud computing use in Austria.