The world isn’t facing an energy crisis just yet, but it may only be a matter of time. Energy production is dropping, and while many countries are trying desperately to shift gears towards renewables, they’re failing. Data centers are among the world’s largest energy hogs. Their massive power consumption needs leave a huge carbon footprint behind. The Next Web estimates that data centers generate a similar carbon output to the global airline industry. Clearly, this is an unsustainable practice. If humans are to survive into the future with data centers that are still functional, making them more energy efficient is critical. But how do we go about doing that?
Data Means Lower Environmental Impact, Right?
One of the earliest marketing tactics that computers used was comparing their lowered paper consumption. The argument’s thrust was that data didn’t destroy trees and was, therefore, better for the environment. While the trees are safe, the environment itself might not be. A Greenpeace report notes that if the Global IT industry compared to countries, it would be third in carbon emissions behind the US and China. The promise of lowered environmental impact seems to be a broken contract.
Data centers are at the core of this massive carbon footprint. You may think that it’s all bits and bytes, and there’s no real consumption of power. However, Google mentions that a simple search like this can use as much electricity as it takes to illuminate a 60-watt lightbulb. This small energy cost seems negligible, but when you consider how much Google searches are performed daily, it quickly mounts up. With this much energy being consumers in just searches, it’s not hard to see where this massive carbon footprint cost is coming from. Millions of searches equate to a lot of lightbulbs. So how do we go about fixing this situation?
Renewable Energy Hubs Mean A Shift to Green Data Centers
According to ZDNet, companies like Google and Microsoft are locating some of their newer data centers in Finland because of its sustainable energy generation. Google signed a deal recently to buy all the power from the Netherland’s largest solar generation park, in the hopes that they could use it to power their own data centers. These solutions remove the dependence on carbon-based energy generation sources and focus on powering their data centers using renewables. Despite the push for renewably-powered data centers, many companies are still not seeing its benefit. Renewable energy isn’t as reliable or efficient as carbon-based sources.
There is an element of smoke-and-mirrors in these massive data center energy reports. Many of these gigantic corporations refer to renewable energy certificates, which they receive for generating energy to add to a company’s grid. The energy their data centers consume isn’t renewable, making their claims less than honest. To offset their impact, some companies like Microsoft put their effort into reafforestation projects to help soak up CO2 emissions. While a lot of the focus is placed on Western countries, they seem to be doing their part to balance their carbon emissions. The same can’t be said for Asian tech companies.
New tech businesses such as Tencent and Alibaba rely on data centers as well, but in typical fashion, these companies couldn’t care less about their carbon emissions. They don’t report their emissions numbers to any oversight committee, and only their home countries know how much energy they consume. Unfortunately, they aren’t willing to admit those numbers for transparency since China is notoriously against the free spread of information. A lot of these data centers are housed in low-income countries that have hot climates. Much of the energy they consume is just to keep their data centers cool. With such a vast unknown amount of energy consumption, the global IT industry may well be the largest contributor to global warming by sector in the world.
Efficiency Matters Too
Aside from shifting away from carbon-based sources, data centers need to develop more energy-efficient methods of operation. As we mentioned before, several of the world’s largest data centers are located in hot countries. By relocating them to colder countries, there is less of a need to cool them down. European data centers tend to have lower energy consumption than those in other parts of the world. Better efficiency means that there may be space for more data centers using less power to operate each one.
The Need For An Efficient Data Center
The world runs on data. Almost nothing that a company can do today to remain competitive doesn’t rely on data in some form. Most of these businesses leverage servers and storage from corporate providers. Their distributed data centers make for easy access and quick processing of information. As carbon-based energy costs start to rise, businesses would be best served to look at energy-efficient data centers. Aside from saving the environment, it would also mean lowered operation costs for their data usage.
