Clean/Green Stadia - environmental questions

[Kainaille]

Dear Stadia team, I am very enthusiastic about Stadia's performance and have been a user from the very beginning. However, I received a lot of headwind in my Berlin Circle of Friends for my use of Stadia, the reason being the environmental impact. I am therefore urged to sell my Stadia system. I would now like to have arguments for these discussions. Can you help me, e.g. by specifying how much electricity per hour Stadia streaming is used, how the electricity is generated (in Germany or abroad), whether the electricity consumption comes from fossil or renewable energy sources and whether there are comparisons with conventional game systems such as PC or PS4 there? Thanks alot!

[Northlight]

@Kainaille It's a valid question and I was wondering the same myself however there was nothing officially publish about Stadia's environmental impact and whitout it your friends claims are speculative. There is a lot of data needed and so little is known by the general public at this point.

With that said here is the corporative informations Google provide about it's different infrastructures. 

https://sustainability.google/projects/announcement-100/

[WazMeister]

Whatever the case,  if it was a home pc or console with 1000's using it,  I'm sure it be more.

Curious, do your environmentalist friends use or. Own a home console or PC and if so, do they use reusable energy? 

[Deleted User]

Definitely a great question. Data centers are a huge energy suck (3% of global consumption and rising) and transferring the energy burden from a local console is, on aggregate, only going to make that worse.

Obviously I can't speak for Google, to whom the question has been addressed, but I have been peripherally involved in data center design and deployment for other companies. An environmental impact mindset definitely exists in that sphere, but has historically been driven more by economic incentives than actual concern for the environment.

The flip side of this argument is not "well how much energy do your friends use?!" indignation, but instead is "how important is data?" More and more data is being gererated, and we have to have somewhere to serve it all from. A lot of the data is important - some of it will save us from climate extinction I hope - so we have to figure out how to solve this problem.

Gaming is not a trivial pursuit, no matter what some may say. And asking questions like this pushes the conversation forward.

Thanks for making me think about it @Kainaille ! As always, Germany is asking the real questions, no change there! And now, more gaming...

[DonTonyDeluca]

I think this is a great question, and one that is of potential importance to conscious consumers and more. I would estimate that Stadia uses less on average due to overall production, distribution, and consumption costs of a home console vs. Stadia, even considering server costs; but I need data to confirm or refute this. I would also, like you, appreciate Google release their energy and resource costs per Stadia unit. Keep this conversation going!

[doublemp]

I would say one argument is that the same hardware gets used over and over again. I'll use some made up numbers to demonstrate. 

Let's say that the average console probably sits around 95% of the time. A Stadia server probably gets used 80% of the time - if you're not playing on it, someone else will. Now imagine how many physical items can be spared by not producing inefficient consoles and producing more efficient servers as well. Think also of the packaging. The numbers are probably huge.

Furthermore, when new generation comes out, a whole console typically needs to be replaced, but the serves can be upgraded more gradually, eg. CPUs upgraded without upgrading the whole sever, and even then the old CPUs can be reused for some less intensive workloads (idk, email). 

[BlastHardcheese]

Since 2017, Google purchases renewable energy to match 100% of the consumption of data centers and offices https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/

[Nilas]

@Kainaille Stadia uses energy that you're not using. I mean the energy you're not using when you do not use a PC master race with high end CPU and GPU is used in their data center instead. It should be the same wether 1 million of people use 1 million of computers locally or 1 million of people are using the energy of a data center.

Now think about the actual save made by digital over physical copies. Plastic, papers, and all these matters.

I am not saying Stadia is green, but I believe it's a step forward and actually a true solution for the future as it looks way more easy to force a company to respect environment rather than millions of people separately.