The carbon cost of data

News: Environmental scientists are beginning to worry about the harmful effects of data on climate. The impact is not exactly due to the data, but the servers, data farms and other hardware required for creating, storing and processing data for the increasingly digital life.

How the pace of generation of data has picked up?

Impact of the internet: The world has been steadily getting interconnected and digitalised since the world-wide-web came into being.

Evolution of digital tech: The rapid evolution of the Cloud, high speed Wi-Fi, and internet of things, and the development of digital goods, have increased the quantity of data being generated, stored and analysed exponentially.

Impact of the pandemic: The trajectory of digitalisation moved up even more sharply when the pandemic struck. Companies were forced to increase their digital footprint. They also moved a lot of their operations to the cloud — which meant moving applications and data to huge server farms.

How cloud industry poses a threat to the environment?

Server farms consume a lot of electricity.

– Power required to run the servers themselves

– Air conditioning systems needed to run them also consume a lot of energy.

Data farms generate enormous heat, and need very powerful air conditioning systems to maintain optimum temperature.

Water consumption: Studies have shown that data centres tend to use up water resources and heat the cities where they are located, despite all the air conditioning.

As Cloud servers need to offer zero downtime, they work with built-in redundancies, which increase their energy requirements.

Then, the buildings themselves are considered large emitters — especially older buildings. Older data farms are often in older generation buildings and that contributes to energy requirements too.

It is estimated that the cloud industry consumes more power than many nation states. And it is a bigger emitter than the global aviation industry.

What are the factors on which the carbon footprint of the cloud industry depends?

Power source: The carbon footprint depends on the power source being used, and also the amount of air conditioning needed.

– Many data firms still primarily depend on thermal or gas-fired power stations, though many new ones are being built to utilise mostly renewable power.

Type of silicon chips: The kind of silicon chips used has a role too in the power consumption. Older, more power-guzzling chips have a worse carbon footprint than those that are new and more energy efficient.

Temperature, age and efficiency of the building: Variables like how cold is the geographical area where the server farm is placed as well as the age and energy efficiency of the building all matter in the actual energy being consumed.

Why the environmental concerns are likely to increase in the future?

Increased pace of digitalisation: This means more data is being generated and captured than ever before.

Web 3.0: When Web 3.0 replaces the current Web 2.0, the consumption of data will increase further. This is simply because the blockchain technology on which Web 3.0 is being built consumes huge quantities of energy.

Need for data localisation to increase: Much of the data today is stored in cross-border servers, but as privacy concerns grow, the need for data to be stored locally is also likely to increase. This will lead to a huge spike in server farms being built around the world.

What are the efforts being made to reduce the footprint?

Companies have built data centres in cold regions but, in general, it has not proved very practical.

Tried building submerged data centres in the sea to ensure they remain cool without the need for air conditioners. But the ecology of the sea changes when the data centres are placed underwater. It adversely affects marine life.

What is the way forward?

Building more energy efficient chips

Use green software

Making data centre operations more energy efficient while also using renewable sources, rather than thermal-fuelled electricity.

Source: This post is based on the article “The carbon cost of data” published in The Business Standard on 5th Apr 22.