EXPERT OPINION
Getting behind the green data centre revolution
As global data centre capacity is expected to rapidly increase in the not too far distant future , Fabrizio Garrone , Aruba representative on the Board of Directors of Climate Neutral Data Center Pact , says the data centre industry must take steps towards becoming more sustainable . silver lining of the pandemic is that environmental issues
A came to the forefront of public discourse as citizens everywhere experienced the benefits of constrained travel , production and resource consumption on nature , air quality and climate change . At the same time , however , cloud computing adoption soared because of COVID-19 , creating an interesting tension in the traditionally energy-intensive data centre space .
As remote working has become the norm , even more organisations are now relying on outsourced data centre services and cloud computing to support their everyday operations . The servers , backups and power cooling infrastructure of these accounts for 1 % of total yearly global energy use . To put this into context , consider that annual CO 2 emissions from data centres equal those of the commercial airline industry at pre-pandemic levels .
In a recent survey of IT industry professionals , 85 % predicted that demand for data centre construction would be higher in 2021 than 2020 – a year which was already notable for its high demand . It ’ s no surprise then that many are forecasting an unsustainable growth in electricity use and carbon emissions as new data centres continue to get up and running worldwide .
An emphasis on efficiency
Pleasingly , vendors and operators have become much more conscious of the importance of energy efficiency . As such , electricity demand from data centres globally is expected to remain flat to 2021 , despite a projected 50 % increase in
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