Why Move to Sustainable Data Centers?

You don’t need to be a scientist to know that global warming is spiralling out of control. According to Nasa, the planet has warmed by 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit (1.18 degrees Celsius) in just over a century, with the second warmest year on record happening in 2019 and in May 2020, the highest ever levels of C02 were recorded. 

Whilst many of us experience the effects of warmer summers and milder winters, climate change can have devastating effects on communities and wildlife, with 11% of the world’s population currently vulnerable to disastrous impacts. The IPCC predicted that an increase of just 0.5 degrees over acceptable conditions would result in “substantially more poverty, extreme heat, sea-level rise, habitat loss, and drought”.  

With this in mind, it’s not difficult to see the effects Global warming is already having on the planet, just look at the 2019/2020 Australian wildfires. The increased temperatures, high winds, and prolonged periods of drought meant that it took many months for the fires to be contained. The impact of the fires was catastrophic, with 46 million acres of land burnt, 3,500 homes lost, and several people dead.

And then you have the floods across Europe this summer, with the Belgian Minister of home affairs claiming the floods to be “one of the greatest natural disasters our country has ever known”. The warmer temperatures have resulted in the water on land and at sea evaporating more rapidly causing rain and heavier storms. As the temperature continues to increase, so will these types of events, and unless countries adapt we will see more flash floods having devastating impacts.

Only recently in the UK, with temperatures hitting a sweltering 32 degrees, and rainfall at an all-time high – scientists have warned that the country is already ‘undergoing disruptive climate change’ and in the next 10 years could see temperatures regularly rise to 40 degrees Celsius in the summer if we get 1.5 degrees warming. The country is not built for these kinds of temperatures, homes and buildings are specifically built to retain heat with little or no air-conditioning, roads were melting, and several deaths have been recorded as a result of the warmer climates.

Even as I write this, wildfires have been blazing across Italy, Greece, and Turkey for almost a week now as temperatures are soaring to an incredible 45 degrees Celsius daily. Homes, holiday resorts and beaches are being evacuated. And whilst wildfires are common in these areas, they are not usually this big. In Turkey alone there are currently 120 active fires due to the weather being around 5-6 degrees warmer than in it usually is for this time of year, which scientists have put down to climate change. 

As records continue to be broken, countries have come together to slow down the damaging effects we’re having on the planet. The case for change is overwhelming - with scientists, environmentalists, and global leaders in agreement that our greenhouse gas and carbon emissions are endangering the very fabric of our planet. Long dismissed as pseudo-scientific claims or at best, lacking proof, climate change and the impact of our carbon footprint is undeniable. 

So, what is having an impact on global warming, and what can we do to change it? First we need to look at what and how energy is being consumed. Recent studies show that Global Data Center energy consumption is estimated at around 1% of our total energy use but studies in the UK set this much higher with the UK Energy Research Center estimating (including enterprise on-premises scenarios) as high as 12.3% of all the energy consumed in the UK. With technology advances and the digital economy on the rise, this number is only set to increase. And, whilst these figures only paint half the picture, they are compelling when looking at areas that need to change. 

But it isn’t just powering these Data Centers that is consuming all of the energy, but also the cooling of the environment and facilities they’re kept in. Hardware heats up as we know and overheating can be catastrophic for the Data Center performance, therefore a great deal of power is used to keep the hardware cool and functioning properly. Analysts report between 30 and 55% of all Data Center energy use lies with powering cooling and ventilation systems – energy that is largely still carbon powered and unsustainable.

And it’s not just power used, many Data Centers consume a lot of water, with only a third of operators currently reporting their water consumption. Even within the reported numbers there is a lack of visibility over Water Energy Source Use where consumption measures account for water used in the creation of energy.

When we think how much time people spend online, whether that’s on our phones, working at our computer, downloading a book to a tablet, or purchasing the latest must-have item, we rarely consider the price of that action on our environment, particularly when billions of people around the world all online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that is a lot of pressure put on our Data Centers. Many people don’t realise that every single online interaction, no matter how small, contributes to climate change, whilst putting significant pressure on the Data Center. As technology advances, and the demands for connection speeds gets faster, Data Centers face technological, operational, and sustainable challenges.