Greenpeace report How Clean is Your Cloud? I saw mentioned in 3T magazine news is actually quite interesting reading. This year’s report provides a look at the energy choices some of the largest and fastest growing IT companies. The report analyzes the 14 IT companies and the electricity supply chain in more than 80 data center cases.
The report contains also lots of interesting background information on both IT and telecom energy consumption. I recommend checking it out. Here are some points picked from How Clean is Your Cloud? report:
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo – these global brands and a host of other IT companies are rapidly and fundamentally transforming the way in which we work, communicate, watch movies or TV, listen to music, and share pictures through “the cloud.”
The growth and scale of investment in the cloud is truly mind-blowing, with estimates of a 50-fold increase in the amount of digital information by 2020 and nearly half a trillion in investment in the coming year, all to create and feed our desire for ubiquitous access to infinite information from our computers, phones and other mobile devices, instantly.
The engine that drives the cloud is the data center. Data centers are the factories of the 21st century information age, containing thousands of computers that store and manage our rapidly growing collection of data for consumption at a moment’s notice. Given the energy-intensive nature of maintaining the cloud, access to significant amounts of electricity is a key factor in decisions about where to build these data centers. Industry leaders estimate nearly $450bn US dollars is being spent annually on new data center space.
Since electricity plays a critical role in the cost structure of companies that use the cloud, there have been dramatic strides made in improving the energy efficiency design of the facilities and the thousands of computers that go inside. However, despite significant improvements in efficiency, the exponential growth in cloud computing far outstrips these energy savings.
How much energy is required to power the ever-expanding online world? What percentage of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is attributable to the IT sector? Answers to these questions are very difficult to obtain with any degree of precision, partially due to the sector’s explosive growth, a wide range of devices and energy sources, and rapidly changing technology and business models. The estimates of the IT sector’s carbon footprint performed to date have varied widely in their methodology and scope. One of the most recognized estimates of the IT sector’s footprint was conducted as part of the 2008 SMART 2020 study, which established that the sector is responsible for 2% of global GHG emissions.
The combined electricity demand of the internet/cloud (data centers and telecommunications network) globally in 2007 was approximately 623bn kWh (if the cloud were a country, it would have the fifth largest electricity demand in the world). Based on current projections, the demand for electricity will more than triple to 1,973bn kWh (an amount greater than combined total demand of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil).
The report indicates that, due to the economic downturn and continued energy efficiency and performance improvements, global energy demand from data centers from 2005-2010 increased by 56%. Estimates of data center electricity demand come in at 31GW globally, with an increase of 19% in 2012 alone. At the same time global electricity consumption is otherwise essentially flat due to the global recession is still a staggering rate of growth.
Given the scale of predicted growth, the source of electricity must be factored into a meaningful definition of “green IT”. Energy efficiency alone will, at best, slow the growth of the sector’s footprint. The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector’s sustainability efforts according to the report.
The global telecoms sector is also growing rapidly. Rapid growth in use of smart phones and broadband mobile connections mean mobile data traffic in 2011 was eight times the size of the entire internet in 2000. It is estimated that global mobile data traffic grew 133% in 2011, with 597 petabytes of data sent by mobiles every month. In 2011, it is estimated that 6 billion people or 86.7% of the entire global population have mobile telephone subscriptions. By the end of 2012, the number of mobile connected devices is expected to exceed the global population. Electronic devices and the rapidly growing cloud that supports our demand for greater online access are clearly a significant force in driving global energy demand.
What about telecoms in the developing and newly industrialized countries? The report has some details from India (by the way it is expected that India will pass China to become the world’s largest mobile market in terms of subscriptions in 2012). Much of the growth in the Indian telecom sector is from India’s rural and semi-urban areas. By 2012, India is likely to have 200 million rural telecom connections at a penetration rate of 25%. Out of the existing 400,000 mobile towers, over 70% exist in rural and semi-urban areas where either grid-connected electricity is not available or the electricity supply is irregular. As a result, mobile towers and, increasingly, grid-connected towers in these areas rely on diesel generators to power their network operations. The consumption of diesel by the telecoms sector currently stands at a staggering 3bn liters annually, second only to the railways in India.
What is the case on other developing and newly industrialized countries? I don’t actually know.
NOTE: Please note that that many figures given on the report are just estimates based on quite little actual data, so they might be somewhat off the actual figures. Given the source of the report I would quess that if the figures are off, they are most probably off to direction so that the environmental effect looks bigger than it actually is.
1,173 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Dmq3LXQCB/
We usually think about AI in terms of what happens on a screen.
A question gets answered. A video loads. A file appears in the cloud. A recommendation shows up almost instantly.
But somewhere behind all of that is a physical world of computers, buildings, electricity, cooling systems, land—and in some places, a lot of water.
Data centers are becoming the infrastructure behind much of modern digital life. They run AI systems, cloud services, streaming platforms and countless other technologies that most of us use without ever thinking about what is happening inside those buildings.
As the demand for computing grows, so does the pressure on the resources needed to keep these facilities running. Cooling alone can require significant amounts of water and energy, depending on the technology and location.
That doesn’t mean innovation has to stop.
It means the infrastructure supporting it has to evolve too.
Researchers, engineers and communities are looking at ways to reduce that footprint, including more efficient computing, cleaner sources of electricity, water-saving cooling systems and the use of recycled water where possible.
The real challenge isn’t choosing between technology and the environment.
It’s figuring out how to build the next generation of technology without treating the resources around us as unlimited.
AI may be digital, but the systems that make it possible are very real.
And if technology is going to keep moving forward, the way we power and cool it has to move forward with it
Tomi Engdahl says:
If you want to preserve resources then look at power stations that use way more water then data centers, golf courses that use even more then power stations and personal lawns that use more then gold courses. You’re screaming at the leaves when the root of the problem is right there
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google is facing a regulatory investigation in Finland after clearing over 300 hectares of forest in Muhos and Kajaani without required local permits and before finishing environmental impact assessments for its major data center project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://woodcentral.com.au/google-finland-data-centre-felling/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Claim seen:
Doesn’t nasa have a heat dispursing foam we could spray instead of using water? Or maybe use contaminated water to begin with? Or perhaps use ai to figure out a way to not use fresh water? This seems like an intellectual problem more than a mechanical problem; how ironic.
Answer:
This claim stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of physics and thermodynamics: data center cooling is not about containing or blocking heat—it is about moving heat away from electricity-hungry chips into the surrounding atmosphere.
The phrase “heat-dispersing foam insulation” is actually a fictional item trope from video games (like Deus Ex). NASA does use foam—such as spray-on foam insulation (SOFI) on space shuttle tanks and aerogels for space suits—but foam is an insulator, not a coolant.
There are data centers that actually do use reclaimed/greywater whenever possible, but doing so presents major engineering trade-offs.
AI is Already Optimizing This: Google, Microsoft, and AWS already use machine learning algorithms to tune HVAC flow rates, chiller speeds, and server loads based on weather forecasts. However, AI cannot bypass the First Law of Thermodynamics—heat must physically transfer somewhere.
Cooling is a Physics Problem, Not a Coding Problem: To cool a 100-megawatt data center without water, you must transfer that thermal energy into ambient air using dry coolers (radiators) or have some other place you can send it to (there are countries where hneat from data centers in reused for district heating, keep swimming pools warm, heat greenhouses, etc.)
The reason tech companies are shifting away from fresh water isn’t because of a magic foam or an AI revelation; it’s because municipalities are forcing them to switch to closed-loop dry-cooling radiators (accepting higher power bills) or direct-to-chip liquid cooling that continuously recirculates closed fluid without evaporating a single drop.
Tomi Engdahl says:
depends on the system
“The water is reused. It doesn’t just disappear after it’s used.”
Cooling water is either in a closed-loop, pressurized system (no contamination; it stays in the hydronic cycle)
OR
a total‑loss well system where water taken from the ground is returned to the ground.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here is the whole story:
In Closed-Loop Systems (Zero-Water Data Centers): They do recycle water indefinitely. These facilities fill internal cooling pipes once, sealed like a car’s radiator, continuously recirculating the same fluid without losing water to the atmosphere.
In Evaporative Systems (High-Water Data Centers): They recycle water a few times on-site, but ultimate consumption is lost through evaporation. Water is cycled through cooling towers 3 to 7 times. However, as pure H2O evaporates into steam to strip away heat, minerals concentrate in the remaining liquid. Eventually, this mineral-heavy “blowdown water” must be flushed into municipal sewers, while the evaporated water exits into the atmosphere—meaning it is consumed, not recycled back into the local aquifer.
Reclaimed “Greywater” Usage: Some operators do “recycle” at a municipal level by using treated city sewage effluent instead of drinking water. While this avoids tapping potable supplies, that water is still evaporated away into the atmosphere during cooling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Claims seen:
Communist China is funding opposition to data centers in America. The Communists want to dominate us and fools are falling for it. There are hundreds of data centers that have been in operation for decades. They have never bothered anyone. They don’t have to make noise and they don’t consume water rather it’s recycled just like the water in your car radiator. It’s all lies for the weakminded. If you are lucky to get a data center in your county you can see your property taxes cut in half because the data center will be paying massive taxes. You will also see your electric bill lowered.
That claim packs a lot of intense statements together, reflecting how heated local debates over technology, taxes, and resources have become across the country. Breaking down what actually happens with data centers shows a picture that is quite different from these extreme claims.
There is no reliable evidence or official intelligence report showing that foreign governments like China are funding local grassroots movements against data centers in the U.S. There is evidence on spreading on-line propaganda in social media platforms.
Modern hyperscale data centers require massive industrial cooling units, backup diesel generators, and electrical transformers. Large cooling fans and chillers run continuously (24/7), producing a low-frequency hum. While newer designs include sound walls and acoustic baffling, noise remains one of the top complaints from neighbors living near newly built facilities. There are many smaller data centers that do not bother anyone near.
Water Usage Mechanics
Closed-Loop Systems: These do operate like a radiator, using a sealed fluid loop with zero ongoing water loss.
Evaporative Towers: Many existing facilities use open-loop evaporative towers to save electricity. In these systems, water is continuously evaporated into steam to carry away heat, consuming millions of gallons of municipal water that leaves the local watershed rather than staying in a closed loop.
Taxes and Local Electric Bills
The economic trade-offs for local communities vary significantly depending on local policy.
Debates around data center siting usually come down to standard local planning questions: balancing industrial tax revenue against regional power grid capacity, water availability, and noise for nearby residents.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data centers are essentially the physical factories of the modern internet. Claiming they “serve no other purpose” than to drain resources misses the fact that almost every digital service in modern society runs inside one.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Not One Massive Central Data Center?
Building a single, giant “global data center” fails due to two major physical constraints:
The Speed of Light (Latency): Data travels through fiber-optic cables as light signals. If all the world’s data centers were in one location (e.g., Iceland), a user clicking a button in Tokyo or Sydney would experience noticeable delays (latency) waiting for the signal to travel across the globe and back. Real-time tasks like medical imaging, financial trading, or voice calls would lag significantly.
Single Point of Failure & Grid Limits: Stacking tens of gigawatts of computing power in one geographic location would require a power grid larger than most small nations, and any regional power outage or natural disaster would take down the global internet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your curiosity is hitting on several real engineering concepts—and asking these exact “what if” questions is precisely how engineers evaluate new site designs and cooling architectures.
Yes, at its root, the long-term data center challenge is fundamentally a power generation and heat rejection problem.
1. “Would smaller nuclear power akin to military submarines work?”
Yes—and this is actively happening right now.
The technology you’re referring to is called a Small Modular Reactor (SMR). Submarines have used compact nuclear reactors for decades, and the tech industry is pivoting hard toward them.
2. “Can we vacuum seal secondary containers?”
Vacuum sealing is a great way to prevent heat from entering something (like a Thermos flask), but for a data center, it creates the opposite problem: it traps heat inside.
3. “Would low-pressure cooling cause condensation as a secondary measure?”
In thermodynamics, reducing pressure actually makes water boil at lower temperatures (this is why water boils at 90°C on top of Mount Everest instead of 100°C).
Engineers actually do use low-pressure or phase-change cooling in advanced setups.
4. “No one said anything had to be at sea level—or why not build one central data center?”
Siting Above Sea Level / Cold Climates
Moving data centers to higher altitudes or cold northern latitudes (like Sweden, Norway, or Iceland) is one of the most effective strategies in use today. Cold mountain or arctic air allows for “free air cooling,” where outside air is blown directly through the building without needing evaporative water or heavy refrigeration chillers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Modern data centers do not consume water, they are closed-loop. The bathrooms and landscaping consume the most water in a modern data center. By the way, how is your golf game going?
Tomi Engdahl says:
While reusing vacant warehouses sounds like an ideal fix on paper, converting existing industrial buildings into modern data centers is rarely practical for several major technical reasons:
Massive Power Scale Mismatch: Standard warehouses are wired for lighting and light equipment (a few hundred kilowatts). Modern cloud and AI data centers require 50 to 500+ Megawatts—the power equivalent of a small city. Existing industrial parks almost never have the high-voltage power lines or substations on-site to handle that load.
Floor Load Limits: High-density server racks weigh between 2,000 and 4,000 lbs. Standard warehouse concrete slabs are engineered for light storage and would crack or collapse without completely tearing out the floor and repouring massive reinforced concrete foundations.
Roof & Ceiling Constraints: Modern data centers require significant vertical clearance for hot/cold air containment and heavy HVAC/chilled-water cooling systems. Standard warehouse roofs aren’t structurally engineered to support thousands of pounds of overhead cooling infrastructure.
Fiber and Grid Logistics: Facilities must sit directly alongside major fiber optic backbones and utility supply nodes. Most empty warehouses were located based on truck highway access, not high-speed data trunks or utility grid capacity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Converting former paper mills into high-density data centers has been one of Finland’s most successful industrial adaptive reuse strategies. As graphic paper demand declined over the past two decades, paper mill closures left behind world-class industrial assets ideally suited for modern compute infrastructure: high-capacity electrical grid connections (100+ MW), heavy-duty building shells, existing industrial water intake systems, and direct access to district heating networks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Power Grid Locality: Building one giant 10-Gigawatt facility in a single state would exceed the capacity of regional power grids. Spreading facilities across the country matches regional grid capacities.
Risk Diversification: Concentrating infrastructure in a few locations creates extreme vulnerability to regional power grid failures, earthquakes, or physical grid attacks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1MhydT6KJk/
Burning the earth to make AI-generated cartoons and fake photos may be the dumbest time to be alive.
MIT Technology Review’s analysis estimated that a high-quality AI image used about as much energy as a microwave running for 5.5 seconds. A five-second AI video used more than 700 times that energy, roughly equal to running a microwave for over an hour. The IEA says coal and natural gas supplied much of global data-center electricity.
#photography #ArtificialIntelligence #Energy
References:
MIT Technology Review:We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
International Energy Agency:Energy and AI examines data-center electricity demand, supply sources, and future growth.
Union of Concerned Scientists:Environmental impacts of AI include rising electricity demand from increasingly energy-intensive applications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Wind and solar are NOT green or efficient… facts!”
Energy Return on Investment (EROI): Utility-scale solar panels pay back the energy required to manufacture, transport, and install them within 1 to 2 years of operation. Over a 25-to-30-year lifespan, a solar installation generates 10 to 20 times more clean energy than it took to create.
Lifecycle Carbon Emissions: While wind turbines and solar panels do require mining (silicon, copper, rare earths) and manufacturing, their lifecycle carbon footprint is 90% to 95% lower than coal or natural gas per megawatt-hour generated.
Efficiency Context: Solar photovoltaic (PV) efficiency (typically 20%–24% for commercial panels) measures how much sunlight is converted directly to electricity. While that sounds low, solar has zero fuel cost. In contrast, a traditional coal plant converts about 33% of its thermal fuel energy into electricity while continuously burning fossil fuels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Solar requires back up power / doesn’t work for baseload”
This part is partially true, but incomplete. Solar and wind are intermittent (they only generate power when the sun shines or the wind blows).
The Modern Solution: Grids do not rely on solar alone. They pair utility-scale solar with grid-scale battery storage (BESS), pumped hydro, or natural gas “peaker” plants to smooth out supply. In places like California and Texas, massive battery installations now store daytime solar energy to power the grid through peak evening hours.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The transition to clean energy isn’t happening because of “marketing brainwashing”—it’s happening because utility-scale solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of new electricity generation per megawatt-hour in most of the world.
The real engineering challenge isn’t whether solar or wind work; it’s building out grid storage, transmission lines, and baseload power (like nuclear or geothermal) fast enough to support growing demand from computing, manufacturing, and transportation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19VSwtX7vb/
AI data centers are exploring new cooling technologies as increasingly powerful chips generate enormous amounts of heat.
One emerging approach is two-phase immersion cooling, where computing hardware is surrounded by a non-conductive liquid. Heat from the chips causes the liquid to vaporize, carrying heat away before the vapor condenses and returns to the cooling cycle.
Some specialized cooling fluids are fluorinated chemicals, and certain fluorinated compounds fall under the broad category of PFAS, often called “forever chemicals” because many persist in the environment.
The technology can significantly reduce on-site water consumption compared with conventional water-based cooling. However, that does not mean every data center is replacing water with PFAS, nor are all immersion-cooling fluids necessarily PFAS. Chemical selection, containment, recycling and disposal are important environmental considerations.
As AI infrastructure expands, the industry is increasingly balancing electricity use, water consumption, heat management and chemical impacts when designing new data centers.
#fblifestyle #Polarbear #AI #DataCenters #WaterCrisis
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FThDBayLH/
Memphis, Tennessee’s Colossus 2 AI data center has an estimated computing-power capacity of about 946 megawatts, according to the figures provided.
If its equipment operated continuously at full capacity for an entire year, that would translate to roughly 8.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, comparable to the annual electricity purchases of approximately 770,000 average U.S. homes.
The enormous power demand comes from the specialized computing chips used to train and operate advanced AI models. Those systems also generate substantial heat, requiring cooling infrastructure that adds to the facility’s overall energy needs.
Meeting demand at this scale can require significant upgrades to local power infrastructure and potentially additional generation capacity. As AI data centers continue expanding, their electricity requirements are becoming an increasingly important issue for utilities, communities and policymakers.
The comparison with households illustrates the scale of the infrastructure behind modern AI, even though the actual electricity consumption of a facility depends on how much of its capacity is operating at any given time.
#fblifestyle #Polarbear #AI #DataCenters #Energy