“The gigabytes of data we’re using — although invisible — come at a significant cost to the environment,” argues the CBC’s senior technology reporter. “Some experts say it rivals that of the airline industry.”
And as more smart devices rely on data to operate (think internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars), their electricity demands are set to skyrocket. “We are using an immense amount of energy to drive this data revolution,” said Jane Kearns, an environment and technology expert at MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. “It has real implications for our climate.” [Kearns is also the co-founder of the CanadaCleantech Alliance….]
It’s not the gadgets themselves that are drawing so much power, it’s the far-flung servers that act as their electronic brains… The data centres, often bigger than a football field, house endless stacks of servers handling many terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of digital traffic. Just as laptops tend to warm during heavy usage, servers must be cooled to avoid overheating. And cooling so many machines requires plenty of power. Anders Andrae, a researcher at Huawei Technologies Sweden whose estimates are often cited, told CBC News in an email he expects the world’s data centres alone will devour up to 651 terawatt-hours of electricity in the next year. That’s nearly as much electricity as Canada’s entire energy sector produces. And it’s just the beginning.
Andrae’s calculations, published in the International Journal of Green Technology, suggest data centres could more than double their power demands over the next decade. He projects computing will gobble up 11 per cent of global energy by 2030 and cloud-based services will represent a sizeable proportion of that. “This will become completely unsustainable by 2040,” Andrae wrote…
The information and communications technology sector as a whole is thought to be responsible for two to three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions — roughly on par with the often-criticized airline sector.
The article also notes that by 2018 Amazon had already switched to renewable energy for at least 50% of its cloud computing servers. And it also adds that tech companies “in Canada and abroad…are coming up with innovative solutions to curb the growing problem.”
Solutions being investigated include recovering the low-level heat generated by servers and increasing the speed and capacity of data transfers (including one approach involving a quantum dot multi-wavelength laser).
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot