Scaling Down Data Centers > better ways to cool data centres and to recycle their waste heat.

NEWS FEATURE                    

12 September 2018 | Correction 13 September 2018                                

How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity

The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin

Source: https://www.nature.com.

 

. . . Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.

These huge buildings are the treasuries of the new industrial kings: the information traders. The five biggest global companies by market capitalization this year are currently Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, replacing titans such as Shell and ExxonMobil. Although information factories might not spew out black smoke or grind greasy cogs, they are not bereft of environmental impact. As demand for Internet and mobile-phone traffic skyrockets, the information industry could lead to an explosion in energy use (see ‘Energy forecast’).

Already, data centres use an estimated 200 terawatt hours (TWh) each year. That is more than the national energy consumption of some countries, including Iran, but half of the electricity used for transport worldwide, and just 1% of global electricity demand (see ‘Energy scale’). Data centres contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions, whereas the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem as a whole — under a sweeping definition that encompasses personal digital devices, mobile-phone networks and televisions — accounts for more than 2% of global emissions.

That puts ICT’s carbon footprint on a par with the aviation industry’s emissions from fuel.
What could happen in the future is hard to forecast.
But one of the most worrying models predicts that electricity use by ICT could exceed 20% of the global total by the time a child born today reaches her teens, with data centres using more than one-third of that (see ‘Energy forecast’)¹.
If the computationally intensive crypto currency Bitcoin continues to grow, a sharp rise in energy demand could come sooner rather than later (see ‘The Bitcoin bite’).
. . . With the spectre of an energy-hungry future looming, scientists in academic labs and engineers at some of the world’s wealthiest companies are exploring ways to keep the industry’s environmental impact in check. They are streamlining computing processes, switching to renewables and investigating better ways to cool data centres and to recycle their waste heat.
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. . . “The trend is good right now, but it’s questionable what it’s going to look like in 5–10 years,” says Dale Sartor, who oversees the Center of Expertise for Energy Efficiency in Data Centers at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
. . . Shift to high gear
Perhaps the most startling forecast of ICT’s future energy demand comes from Anders Andrae, who works on sustainable ICT at Huawei Technologies Sweden in Kista; he predicts that data-centre electricity use is likely to increase about 15-fold by 2030, to 8% of projected global demand¹. Such dire numbers are controversial.