Google last year also signed a deal to buy all the energy from the Netherlands’ largest solar energy park, to power one of its four European data centers. The availability of renewable energy is one reason Google and Microsoft have recently built hubs in Finland, and Facebook in Denmark and Sweden. In the U.S., those can still be hard to come by. More often, the data titans sign contracts to receive dedicated supply from existing wind and solar farms. In February, cloud giant Switch, which runs three of the world’s top 10 data centers, announced plans for a solar-powered hub in central Nevada that will be the largest anywhere outside China.
To fulfil such pledges, some of the biggest are building their own energy campuses. More and more IT companies are boasting of their commitment to achieving 100 percent reliance on renewable energy. “We are seeing a significant increase in the prioritization of renewables among some of the largest internet companies,” last year’s report concluded. On both fronts, there is some good news to report. Two things matter if we are to tame these runaway beasts: One is making them use renewable or other low-carbon energy sources the other is ramping up their energy efficiency. Around a third of internet traffic in North America is already dedicated to streaming Netflix services alone.
IT company Cisco, which tracks these things, reckons video will make up 82 percent of internet traffic by 2021, up from 73 percent in 2016. Streaming video through the internet is what really racks up the data count. Which doesn’t sound a lot until you begin to think about how many searches you might make in a year.Īnd these days, Google is data-lite.
Google estimates that a typical search using its services requires as much energy as illuminating a 60-watt light bulb for 17 seconds and typically is responsible for emitting 0.2 grams of CO2. And it can take as much energy again to keep the servers and surrounding buildings from overheating.Īlmost every keystroke adds to this. The processors in the biggest data centers hum with as much energy as can be delivered by a large power station, 1,000 megawatts or more. Storing, moving, processing, and analyzing data all require energy. If the global IT industry were a country, only China and the United States would contribute more to climate change, according to a Greenpeace report investigating “the race to build a green internet,” published last year. We are often told that the world’s economy is dematerializing – that physical analog stuff is being replaced by digital data, and that this data has minimal ecological footprint. And you still have no way of knowing which center delivers your Netflix download, nor whether it runs on renewable energy using processors cooled by Arctic air, or runs on coal power and sits in desert heat, cooled by gigantically inefficient banks of refrigerators. Yet if there is a data center near you, the chances are you don’t know about it. And with global data traffic more than doubling every four years, they are growing fast. In total, they eat up more than 2 percent of the world’s electricity and emit roughly as much CO2 as the airline industry. The biggest, covering a million square feet or more, consume as much power as a city of a million people. Their construction alone costs around $20 billion a year worldwide. These mostly windowless, featureless boxes are scattered across the globe – from Las Vegas to Bangalore, and Des Moines to Reykjavik. That ethereal place where we store our data, stream our movies, and email the world has a physical presence – in hundreds of giant data centers that are taking a growing toll on the planet.ĭata centers are the factories of the digital age. The cloud is coming back to Earth with a bump.
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