Data centers have become one of the fastest-advancing industries in the world, and with the current global energy crisis, it is an opportune time to discuss the real energy cost of data centers. An argument can be made that they are a major driving force in the energy transition to renewables, and it’s essential to understand why. In this article, we will discuss the growth of data centers, the decoupling of service demand from energy usage, the real challenge of limiting the environmental impact of global internet use, the concept of the energy mix, the growing adoption of renewable energy, and beyond carbon reduction.
Between 2015 and 2021, internet users increased by 60%, and internet traffic by 440%, according to IEA data. Despite a rise in workload for data centers of 260% in the same time period, global energy use attributed to data centers has remained relatively flat, representing just a 10% increase. This decoupling of energy usage from service demand is hugely significant, and it’s being driven by rapid innovation of digital technology in data centers, allowing the industry to offset huge increases in demand with improved infrastructure efficiency.
However, the real challenge is how to limit the environmental impact of global internet use. There is an impact, and we need to continue to use technology and commercial innovation to mitigate it. Looking at the lifecycle of a data center, we see that more than 85% of the carbon impact today comes from operations. There is also certainly an impact during construction and it’s also significant – certainly worthy of mitigation – but net-zero construction will not address the larger part of the challenge: the carbon impact of running the facility for 20 years or more.
A data center’s carbon performance is broadly a function of the energy mix in the location in which it’s operating. The data center industry is a major buyer of PPA agreements for renewable energy, and this has a significant impact on the energy mix. Amazon and Microsoft were the two largest corporate buyers of renewable energy through PPA in 2021. To a degree, the data center industry is helping to drive decarbonization by underwriting a significant proportion of grid-scale, carbon-free energy for the industry.
Growing adoption of renewable energy and higher levels of infrastructure redundancy at the IT level is leading to new design best practices in data centers. Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are replacing diesel gensets as short-term backup power supplies, for example. With energy markets increasingly interconnected, data centers adopting BESS can generate unprecedented revenues by running in island mode in case of outages or stabilizing the frequency of the grid.
The quest for efficiency is as important as ever, and the discipline of energy management has a massive effect on the operational impact of a data center. Innovation in technology for managing environmental conditions inside a data center is having a significant impact on energy consumption. White space cooling is a good example. Our technology for this uses an advanced machine-learning model to analyze the effect of cooling on specific areas of a data center, creating an influence map to limit energy use to only what’s necessary.
Building elasticity into data center design is also a key factor in reducing the sector’s energy consumption and cost. Through intelligent design, instrumentation, control, and automation, a data center can enable and disable capacity when it’s needed, rather than constantly running circuits and networks with no work to do. In addition to preventing the over-provision of infrastructure, this is crucial at times of the year when additional capacity is needed to cover short peaks in demand.
In conclusion, digitalization and the rise of internet access have delivered significant benefits to humanity. However, we need to acknowledge the sustainability impact of our digital lives. The data center industry has led by example by willingly investing in decarbonization and has demonstrated that an ecosystem of technology companies
