The Green Cost of Data
So what's the picture of? A car plant? A plastics factory? Well, no, it's actually a data centre roof. As more and more businesses require serious computing power to run, so demand for data centres is increasing. And, of course, data centres are key to e-commerce and most of what we do online.
But that growth isn't without its costs. Big data centres house hundreds of powerful computers and those computers require a lot of electricity. They also, like all electrical processes, generate heat and it takes an a significant amount of energy to remove that heat and keep the computers cool.
Consuming a lot of electricity has an environmental cost. have issued a report warning that data centres could, by 2012-13 overtake aviation as a cause of greenhouse emissions
To get a sense of how centres consume energy I visited a data centre in the company of its operations manager. You can hear that interview below.
While there is a business case as well as an environmental case for decreasing the energy consumed by data centres there's a debate over whether or not data centres should be regulated to ensure they are as efficient as possible. We received this statement from DEFRA
We know that there are concerns about emissions from data warehousing [data centres] and ICT [Information and communication technology]. We're looking at this in a number of ways, including through the Carbon Reduction Commitment, which will start in 2010. The CRC is a mandatory emissions trading scheme that will cover around 5000 businesses and public sector bodies that use a lot of energy but aren't currently in an emissions trading scheme. It will include organisations from the big banks, supermarkets and hotel chains to government departments and local authorities -- as well as large data warehousing companies
So data centres are part of a strategy covering all businesses that use a lot of energy. And it's worth pointing out that some activities data centre's support, like online shopping and banking, can save emmissions by reducing travel etc.
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