Digiplex

For most businesses, carbon footprint is now a major factor in their conversations around energy supply.  But however smart and successful your approach to managing the power demands of your operations, it will be completely undermined if you don’t pay the same attention to your data.  

Global IT’s appetite for energy is attracting substantial public attention. Headline-grabbing statistics have pitched up around high-profile phenomena like Bitcoin (currently drawing more power than Colombia or Switzerland, according to an ongoing Cambridge University study). There’s a growing awareness that every online purchase, every social media post, every streamed box set carries a cost. But the real story under all of this is data storage.  

The world’s data centres use more than 400TWh of electricity per year - around 3% of total global demand - and some sources predict this figure reaching 20% by 2025.  This already creates as much as 700 million tons of carbon emissions - around 2% of the global total. As the number of connected devices continues to balloon, along with the astonishing volume of data they generate, these numbers will only grow.  If they continue to do so at the present rate, IT-linked carbon emissions will outstrip the aviation and shipping industries by the mid-2020s. The takeaway is clear: where and how your store your data has a massive impact on the true sustainability of your organisation.

In light of this, it’s striking how many organisations remain unaware of their digital carbon footprint. In a 2018 survey of executives in the Nordics, Digiplex found that while sustainability was the fastest rising factor driving business decision makers, and 74% of respondents believed that their company’s survival relied on digitisation, 60% didn’t know the physical location of their data. 

Why does this matter?  Because beneath these broader numbers, individual storage facilities vary wildly in their efficiency and commitment to renewable energy.  You need to know where your data is if you want to keep it clean.

For a start, an organisation serious about sustainability should know the Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) rating for every centre it uses.  A PUE of 1.8 means you’re using 30% more energy than you need to compared to the current industry average - which has cost implications, too.  Provided that the information it’s based on is transparent, a lower rating offers a well-informed and engaged client a substantial drop in their power usage per KW of IT load. Efficiency of cooling is a major factor, clearly influenced by the location and climate of the centre itself, but also driven by good maintenance and management practices.  External air cooling isn’t simply a case of opening the windows; airflow filtration and management make it an exact science.

Still more pressing is where the energy comes from in the first place.  And depending on where you store your data, that can be tricky to ascertain. At the recent DCD San Francisco conference, Dr Arman Shehabi from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory called on the industry to be more transparent around its energy use.  Greenpeace’s Click Clean campaign rates major internet companies on their use of renewables, along with a few large data storage providers; but really, any centre serious about their carbon footprint and willing to work in partnership on sustainability should be open about the source of their energy, without needing to have it unearthed by a third party.  You might argue that any centre truly serious about the issue is already well on its way to 100% renewable power - if it isn’t there already.

Geographical location is an issue here, too. You can be as clean as you like at home, but if you’re stuck to a 98% coal-powered grid, you’re throwing tonnes of CO2 around by default. And specific sites may carry further specific benefits.  Heat recapture schemes, in which the heat generated by equipment is passed on to nearby businesses or homes, or used to generate power to return to the grid, can also substantially temper the net energy demand of a centre. 

This throws a new dimension onto the choice between cloud and colocation services. In the cloud, virtual systems and complex decentralised networks make it near-impossible to say where your data sits at one point in time - the question becomes more or less meaningless.  In this case, it’s important to take a view on the overall profile of a cloud provider: many carry substantial variations between their own facilities, as the Greenpeace report mentioned above shows.  

The imperative is no longer in question: renewable energy is essential to viable and responsible operation, and data storage is an increasingly dominant proportion of your energy use.  The key to dealing with this is the locations you choose - and by extension, the partnerships you form - to ensure that your business remains truly sustainable.

Sources:

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/publication/6826/clicking-clean-2017/

http://www.clickclean.org/uk/en/

https://partners.wsj.com/digiplex/green-digital-footprint/

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/analysis/data-center-and-cloud-companies-need-be-more-transparent-about-energy-usage/