By Muqbil Ahmar
Digitisation has left no area of human endeavor untouched. This has led to a veritable data tsunami. No wonder, data centers are springing up everywhere to meet the growing needs for data. With technology shifting from premise-based to cloud-based ones, there is a race to set up data centers all over the world, particularly in India and Asia. Internet services major Amazon launched its first set of data centers in India recently, Microsoft as three, IBM has two, and many others doing the same. As increasingly greater numbers of software companies shift to the cloud, the number of data centers is only set to explode.
Data centers are huge consumers of power
Modern data centers are big industrial facilities that consume huge amounts of power. A typical data center consumes as much electricity as a small town. According to a study by the US Department of Energy, data centers in the country consume around 2% of the total power produced. The facilities used around 70 billion kilowatt hours in 2014, according to the study conducted in collaboration with Stanford, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon universities, roughly translating into energy consumed by 6.4 million average American homes.
Consequently, IT giants are looking at several strategies to offset the environmental costs of running a data center, with the main thrust being on using alternative or renewable energy resources to power the massive facilities. As part of their commitment to a clean environment, technology biggies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are moving their data centers towards all-green operations.
Microsoft leverages green power for its data centers
Microsoft recently announced that its data centers globally would be powered by 50 percent renewable energy by 2018. The IT giant also plans to increase the use of renewable power for data centers to 60 percent by 2020s.
“As we begin to tap the power of the cloud to address these challenges, we must also ensure that we are building a responsible cloud. Tremendous amounts of energy will be required to power this data-driven revolution. The leading cloud companies have a responsibility to address this energy usage. And Microsoft believes that, as large energy consumers, we have the opportunity to drive change that will benefit not only our company but the world,” said Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, on Microsoft’s Green Blog.
“That is why Microsoft announced a new, principled approach to helping advance a clean energy future. We committed to greater transparency, including reporting our energy consumption across regions and the mix of sources for the power we use, while continuing to report our total energy consumption and impact of our carbon program,” added Bernard.
Microsoft is already powered by 40-45% renewable energy sources, claims Microsoft. The IT giant has committed to using 50 percent renewable energy by 2018, 60% by early next decade and to keep enhancing its capacity from there.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook also join the bandwagon
Recently, Apple too announced the completion of a 50MW solar farm in Arizona, USA, to offset power consumption by the company’s new data center in the same region. The company also aims for 100% renewable energy use in the future and has claimed that in 2015, 93% of its energy came from renewable sources of energy. In fact, Apple has been investing in renewable energy resources for many years.
Amazon also has plans to build a 253MW wind farm in the USA to to power its massive cloud operations. The wind farm would be the company’s fifth and largest renewable energy project till date. The cloud giant has also announced other wind and solar projects. According to the company, the entire yearly production of the renewable energy projects will surpass 2.6 million MWh. It has also claimed that 40 percent of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) energy needs would be met by renewable sources by the end of 2016.
Google has aimed for 100% renewable energy sources, claiming to be the largest non-utility purchaser of renewable energy in the world. Facebook too plans to use renewables sources to meet 50 percent of its data center power needs by 2018. Smaller companies like Salesforce too have made substantial commitments to explore renewable energy options.
Renewable energy facilities offset environmental costs of data centers
According to NASA figures, global temperatures have risen by more than 1 degree since 1880, while 9 of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000. In 2012, Arctic ice shrank to its lowest ever level. Global sea levels are rising at 3.4 mm per year. Against such a backdrop, cloud giants want to ensure that their operations don’t have an adverse effect on the environment.
As the hunger for data increases in modern society, giant cloud providers will scramble to keep their operations environmentally sustainable and ecologically viable, so that the environmental costs don’t overrun the cost of digitalisation.
With over 10 years of experience in the field of journalism, the author is a technology evangelist and avid blogger.