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New report exposes power hungry IT sector |
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19 Apr 2012, 9:34 PM
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This week, Greenpeace’s ‘How Green is your Cloud’ report gave a critical account of some of the world’s biggest IT companies and their green credentials. The report claimed that not enough clean energy was being used in data centres and stated that there was a lack of transparency regarding infrastructure and operations.
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Greenpeace found that in 2007 the combined electricity consumption of the internet, data centres, and telecommunications networks globally was approximately 623bn kWh, which, if the same amount of power was used by a country, it would have the fifth largest electricity demand in the world. The new report estimates that based on current rates of growth, the demand for electricity from these applications could be as much as the combined consumption of France, Germany, Canada, and Brazil within 10 years.
A majority of this electricity is generated by coal or nuclear, with huge diesel powered generators in India, driving their booming data and call centre sector. Only Google and Yahoo are making serious attempts to green their supply.
Richard Barrington, from ICT cooling company Iceotope, whose resource efficient systems use no electricity, said “The UK is believed to have the greatest concentration of data centres on the planet, consuming over 6.4 GW of power per year, which is equivalent to six million British households. While some may argue about the accuracy of Greenpeace’s report, it’s clear that this is a major problem in the UK today and one that needs to be addressed. The current method of tuning and tweaking systems simply isn’t good enough and Greenpeace’s report serves to highlight this issue."
“Although this is a big problem, there are people trying to solve it through innovation. In order to turn the current situation around, companies need to start targeting the main issues that affect data centre green credentials – notably power consumption, but also the use of materials, natural resources and electronic waste, which are also of major concern. By employing best practice and making radical, yet practical changes to the current paradigm, the UK can begin to reduce the massive levels of energy being consumed by our data centre facilities, renewable or not".
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