Data Centres and Climate Change – Is there a link?

The world today is driven by the digital disruption that is impacting the way we interact and operate daily. The advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution or 4IR and the Covid pandemic have ramped up the growth of data.

The move away from paper and manual processing to everything digital.        

Data has become the currency of the Digital Age. According to the latest estimates, 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day - “created” includes data that is newly generated, captured, copied, or consumed. In zettabytes, that equates to around 147 zettabytes per year, around 12 zettabytes per month, 2.8 zettabytes per week, or 0.4 zettabytes every day. [one zettabyte is equal to?a trillion gigabytes].

As the digital age accelerates, we are witnessing growth in the size of companies. Coupled with this interesting growth is the complexity and volume of data they handle. Data is crucial to business decision-making and performance improvement. Without data, businesses would not know how well they are doing or what customers want. By collecting and analysing data, businesses can create a recipe for success.

The growth of disruptive technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have served as catalysts for the growth of data. Data we know is the lifeblood of Artificial Intelligence (AI); that is good data that meets respectable data quality standards. The more good data that is available the better the AI models can perform. We all have data on our laptops, and smart devices with businesses having server rooms with data storage capabilities on-premises.

The concept of a computer room was born from the advent of the world’s first computer ENIAC (1945). Having dedicated space for computers has led to the adoption of the idea worldwide. As computers have become more common, faster and smaller, the requirement to have a large, dedicated space on the business premises has resulted in more efficient use of space. Computer rooms transformed into on-site data centres housing a multitude of file servers that provided the use of a variety of applications including email to business users within the corporate network.

The development of the transistor during the 1950s transformed the computing industry. Bell Labs developed the first transistorised computer, called TRADIC (TRAnsistor Digital Computer), in 1954. ?IBM’s 608 was half the size of a comparable system based on vacuum tubes and required 90% less power. It cost $83,210 in 1957.

The smaller size and lower cost of transistorized computers made them suitable for commercial applications. By the 1960s, data centres (or “computer rooms”) were built in office buildings. The new mainframes were faster and more powerful than early machines, with innovations such as memory and storage. Reliability was critical because the entire enterprise IT infrastructure ran on one system. Data centres were designed to ensure ideal operating conditions. In other words, like cooling and airflow, data centre downtime?was a concern even in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

At their core, data centres are highly specialised facilities designed to store, manage, and disseminate vast amounts of data. These range from simple emails sent across the globe in split seconds, to complex financial transactions, and even the streaming of high-definition videos that have become daily norms for countless individuals. A data centre is a physical facility that organisations or companies use to store their critical data and run their applications. The data centre’s key components include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems and servers. The data centres support business services and functions, such as data storage and backup, file sharing, communication services, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

As the world has become more connected with the birth of the internet and the inventions of more robust communications technology, many businesses have reassessed the cost versus return on investment to have all their computer storage on-premises. A key challenge for any business is keeping up with the rapid changes in technology, which is an expensive exercise.

The development of cloud services began as early as the 1960s when three fundamental concepts underpinned this idea. These were delivering a service, such as computing or storage as a utility; the second is multiple people sharing the same computer resource, which is possible through a technology, referred to as virtualisation; the third is accessing services via networking. This appeared radical then, but innovation knows no boundaries and may appear beyond logic at first.

The 1970s and 80s proved to be two decades that laid the key drivers and principles behind cloud services. Research in virtualisation, operating systems, storage and networking advanced resulting in new applications being developed. Through the mishmash of these technologies, testing was carried out that allowed wire transfers between financial institutions.

The dot-com era saw rapid growth in the technology sector only to see the bubble burst very quickly. However, there were benefits to the do-com era, the buildout of the Internet backbone. This resulted in the rise of cloud services in the early 2000s. Companies like Salesforce pioneered the concept of delivering applications via the web in 1999, followed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering computing, storage, and other IT infrastructure in 2006. This has led to data centres taking on a completely new role compared to the old ‘computer room’ that housed huge mainframes and on-premises file servers.

The traditional data centre model (i.e. computer room) is no longer feasible in the cloud-computing world. Cloud providers have commoditised computing, storage, and network resources, which has led to the emergence of mega-scale data centres. These data centres are owned and operated by the cloud providers (CP) themselves. They can offer their services at a lower cost than traditional data centres. The traditional data centre model was based on the premise of renting or leasing space and power from the data centre owner. This is no longer feasible in a cloud-computing world. Cloud Providers can achieve economies of scale quicker as it is a focused business.

We live in a digitally connected world. The 4th Industrial Revolution or AI has catalysed to move the world forward digitally quicker. The digitally driven world generates data, lots of data. From jobs and basic services to entertainment, the world quite practically runs off data and how fast we can process it. With the rapidly evolving technology required to meet the growing demand for processing speed, efficiency, security and storage requirements, businesses turned to cloud computing.

In 2018, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that data centres devoured approximately?200 terawatt-hours?(TWh) of electricity – a figure equivalent to the entire energy consumption of the United Kingdom for the same year.?The annual electricity report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) says data centres consumed 460TWh in 2022, which could rise to more than 1,000TWh by 2026 in a worst-case scenario.

One of the key drivers for the growth of data centres is the impact of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) drive to digital transformation, moving paper-based records and transactions into a digital format that is growing the data coupled with the resurgence of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Driven by AI, broader demand and a deceleration in the pace of?energy efficiency gains, global data centre power demand is poised to more than double by 2030 after being flattish in 2015-20. The carbon footprint of data centres is the highest it has ever been. As more and more operations are managed in the ‘cloud,’ the energy required to process and perform those operations is generated mostly by fossil fuels.

As the volume of data expands, so does the data centre's size, demanding more power to manage it. At 3% of the global electricity supply and accounting for about 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions, data centres have the same carbon footprint as the aviation industry.

Data Centres are not going away with the constant growth of data and AI.        

With the growing demands of AI, data centre storage capacity is expected to grow from 10.1 zettabytes (ZB) in 2023 to 21.0 ZB in 2027, for a five-year compound annual growth rate of 18.5%. Not only will this increased storage generate a need for more data centres, but generative AI’s greater energy requirements – ranging from 300 to 500+ megawatts – will also require more energy-efficient designs and locations. The need for more power will require data centre operators to increase efficiency and work with local governments to find sustainable energy sources to support data centre needs.

Recent predictions state that the energy consumption of data centres is set to account for 3,2% of total worldwide carbon emissions by 2025, increasing to 14% of the world’s emissions by 2024.        

Human activities such as burning oil and gas and deforestation lead to climate change.

Climate change means the fast changes we are seeing to weather conditions, as well as changes to ecosystems, habitats, seas, and the rest of the natural world. Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere. They keep the planet warm enough for life to thrive. Carbon dioxide concentrations are rising mostly because of the fossil fuels that people are burning for energy. Since the middle of the 20th?century, annual emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased every decade, from close to 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year in the 1960s to an estimated 36.6 billion tons in 2023 according to the?Global Carbon Budget 2023

Carbon cycle experts estimate that natural “sinks”—processes that remove carbon from the atmosphere—on land and in the ocean absorbed the equivalent of about half of the carbon dioxide we emitted each year in the 2011-2020 decade. Because we put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than natural sinks can remove, the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases every year.

Carbon dioxide is Earth’s most important?greenhouse gas that absorbs and radiates heat. Unlike oxygen or nitrogen (which comprise most of our atmosphere),?greenhouse gases absorb heat radiating from the Earth’s surface and re-release it in all directions—including back toward the Earth’s surface. Without carbon dioxide, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect would be too weak to keep the average global surface temperature above freezing. By adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the human race is supercharging the natural greenhouse effect, causing global temperature to rise.

According to observations by the NOAA Global Monitoring Lab, in 2021 carbon dioxide alone was responsible for about two-thirds of the?total heating influence?of all human-produced greenhouse gases.

If global energy demand continues to grow rapidly and we meet it mostly with fossil fuels, human emissions of carbon dioxide could reach 75 billion tons per year or more by the end of the century. Atmospheric carbon dioxide could be 800 ppm or higher resulting in conditions not seen on Earth for close to 50 million years.

Climate change is caused by global warming.        

Climate change is real, and so is global warming. Our data thirst is growing resulting in the need for more and larger data centres. As more and more data need to be processed, the larger the data centre must get. Thus, the greatest method to reduce a data centre's environmental impact and operating costs is to reduce the amount of power it requires. The need for server farms is only going to increase as time passes and more people join the Internet. In addition, the amount of data that each person creates is expanding exponentially, which will place pressure on data centres and is going to grow.

According to studies around 40% of the total energy?that data centres consume goes to cooling IT equipment. Energy costs can make up as much as 70% to 80 % of operational expenses for a data centre, and simply put, the power supply is a business-critical issue for data centres

With the challenges facing data centres and hyperscale data centres, key players in this industry are faced with needing to address the energy-hungry needs that have a detrimental effect on the environment and climate change. Technology heavyweights such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have committed to 100% renewable energy use in the coming years.

Introducing energy-efficient technologies is a crucial element in the data centre design and operation. The need to lead with an energy-efficient design from the onset, adopt the latest in building technology and influence the overall supply chain for the actual sourcing of materials for these buildings is non-negotiable.

Data Centre players, regardless of their size or location, must establish proactive sustainability and efficiency measures at inception coupled with leveraging the latest technology to ensure their data centres can be operated, maintained, repaired and refurbished easily, moving into a more circular use of materials and smarter, cleaner way of consuming energy and water. This reminds me of the well-known words of Stephen Covey “Begin with the End in Mind” – the data centres must have as part of the DNA energy efficiency and the lowest carbon footprint possible so that the effects on the environment and climate change are minimised.

Next-generation data centres are a more advanced and elevated form of infrastructure that operates more efficiently, effectively, and sustainably. These data centres rely mostly on software-defined technologies that are mostly automated, multi-layered, and more flexible than traditional data centres. This should reduce the reliability of costly and tedious hardware elements, which are the key components causing harm to the environment.

Data centres are long-term investments that require meticulous planning and careful consideration. When it comes to constructing a hyperscale data centre, due diligence becomes paramount.??With disruptive technologies like AI, cryptocurrency and the Internet of Things, the growth of data and the need for environmentally friendly data centres is a must.

Data centres serve an integral and crucial function in the Digital world we live in. We cannot overlook the importance of addressing the negative impact that data centres are having on the environment and climate change. Working on ensuring that energy usage in data centres is practively managed so that the data centres meet the needs of the demands of today's Digital World whilst addressing climate change is a win-win..which is achievable!

Sources:

• Datacenter Dynamics
• Microsoft
• International Energy Agency?(IEA)
• NOAA Global Monitoring Lab
• Global Carbon Budget 2023
• AWS

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