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.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1L4zLpbBmN/
Ten years ago, data centers barely registered on Ireland’s power grid. They used about five percent of the country’s electricity. That number is now twenty-three percent. To put that in perspective, every single home in Ireland—both urban and rural combined—uses twenty-eight percent. A handful of massive tech facilities are now drawing almost identical power to the entire residential population. The surge is being driven directly by global cloud computing and the massive power requirements of artificial intelligence. Ireland has accidentally become the primary case study for what happens when infinite digital scaling meets a finite electrical grid. Regulators are now stepping in. New data centers are required to build their own flexible on-site power generation. They must also source at least eighty percent of their energy from new renewable projects. It is a strict pivot. The grid simply cannot keep up with the servers. Data from the International Energy Agency suggests these facilities could consume a third of Ireland’s total power by late 2026.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The core physical claim that “glycol transfers heat better than water” is false. Pure water is actually the gold standard for heat transfer fluids. Glycol is considerably worse for heat transfer.
Specific Heat Capacity: Pure water has an exceptionally high specific heat capacity (\approx 4.18 kJ/kg K). A standard 50/50 water-glycol mix drops that capacity down to around 3.45 kJ/kg K
Thermal Conductivity: Adding glycol reduces the overall thermal conductivity of the solution and increases fluid viscosity, requiring pumps to work slightly harder to move the same amount of heat.
Compared to pure water, a water-glycol mixture actually penalizes thermal transfer efficiency by roughly 12% to 20%.
Why Do Closed-Loop Systems Use Glycol?
If glycol is thermally inferior to water, why do engineers mix it into closed cooling loops?
They do it for freeze protection and anti-corrosion, not heat absorption.
In commercial closed-loop data center cooling systems, two main types of industrial glycols are used: Propylene Glycol (PG) and Ethylene Glycol (EG). They are mixed with deionized water (typically at a concentration of 20% to 50% glycol) along with specialized inhibitor packages.
Formulated industrial glycol coolants contain chemical inhibitors that prevent scale buildup, pipe corrosion, and biological growth inside the closed plumbing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Meanwhile, there has been little discussion about refilling reservoirs or expanding desalination efforts. The topic of drought is being ignored, along with concerns about toxic water associated with data centers in Georgia and Texas.”
There are two distinct but closely linked critical issues in the data center debate: long-term water security (desalination and reservoir expansion) and localized toxic water contamination.
While expanding reservoirs or building coastal desalination plants sounds like an obvious fix for data center water draw, operators avoid these solutions due to financial and geographical limits.
Desalination is only viable near coastlines. However, hyperscale clusters are frequently built inland.
Building a modern industrial desalination plant or dedicated reservoir costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires a decade of environmental reviews. Desalination produces toxic, hyper-saline brine waste that presents its own major disposal and environmental regulation challenges.
For tech operators, it is far cheaper and faster to redesign the facility to use dry radiators or closed-loop dielectric liquid cooling (0 L/kWh on-site water consumption) than to build water infrastructure.
The concern surrounding “toxic water” and data centers in states like Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin is real, but it spans two distinct stages of the data center lifecycle.
Much of the recent high-profile outcry in rural Georgia (such as near Meta or QTS construction sites in Morgan and Newton counties) stems from heavy site preparation.
For legacy facilities that still run open evaporative cooling towers, the water discharged isn’t pure H₂O:
Concentrated Chemicals: To prevent algae growth and pipe scaling in humid climates (like Georgia and Texas), operators treat cooling water with anti-scaling chemicals, biocide additives, and corrosion inhibitors.
Cooling Tower “Blowdown”: As water evaporates, dissolved heavy metals, minerals, and chemical additives concentrate in the basin. This wastewater is periodically flushed into local sewers or surface waters.
PFAS & Fire Suppression: Many data centers use fluorinated compounds (PFAS) in specialized chip manufacturing, transformer equipment, and clean-agent fire suppression systems. If poorly managed, runoff or industrial discharge can introduce persistent chemicals into surrounding watersheds.
The debate over water is shifting away from simple “volume consumed” to local environmental protection:
Desalination is rarely the answer because facilities are often inland, making 0\text{-water} closed-loop dry cooling a much cheaper engineering fix.
Toxic water concerns are real, but they are primarily driven by construction-stage site disturbance/aquifer disruption and chemical blowdown wastewater from legacy evaporative cooling towers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robert Beliveau
“The environmental effects of data centers—including their potential impact on cattle ranchers—also need to be investigated. Ranchers have raised concerns that noise pollution from data centers may be affecting cattle health, including weight loss and stillbirths.”
The claim that ranchers are raising concerns about data center noise affecting cattle health seems to be grounded in real, ongoing agricultural disputes.
Formal university-led veterinary studies specifically targeting data center low-frequency noise seem to be still a work in progress. It seems that continuous low-frequency acoustic stress can induce elevated cortisol in livestock, which directly contributes to weight loss, behavioral disruption, and reproductive failure.
Inadequate Decibel Metrics (dBA vs. dBC): Most municipal noise ordinances use the A-weighted decibel scale (dBA), which filters out low-frequency sound because human ears are less sensitive to low pitches. However, the heavy bass hum of a data center chiller yard is better measured on the C-weighted scale (dBC) or low-frequency spectrum. A site can easily pass local dBA noise limits while still emitting a disruptive, low-frequency vibration across nearby pastures.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Academic researchers and university engineering departments have studied—and continue to study—data center thermal management and waste heat recovery extensively.
The issue is not a lack of research. Thousands of peer-reviewed mechanical, electrical, and thermal engineering papers are published every year on this exact problem. The underlying reason data center heat remains a challenge comes down to fundamental physics, economics, and real-world deployment barriers.
What University Researchers Have Already Solved
Academic institutions (like MIT, Georgia Tech, ETH Zürich, Stanford, and Rice University) have partnered with industry to invent many of the cooling technologies used today:
Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling: Researchers pioneered routing non-conductive dielectric liquids or pure water through micro-channel cold plates bolted directly onto CPUs and GPUs.
Two-Phase Immersion Cooling: University labs helped develop dielectric fluids that boil at low temperatures (30^\circ\text{C}\text{–}50^\circ\text{C}) to remove chip heat via vaporization.
Thermoelectric & ORC Power Generation: Engineering groups (such as recent research at Rice University) have developed Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) boosted by solar thermal collectors to turn low-grade server exhaust heat back into usable electricity.
District Heating Coupling: European universities (such as KTH in Sweden and LUT in Finland) have spent over a decade modeling 4th and 5th Generation District Heating (5GDH) loops to pipe warm server water directly into residential heating networks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
University professors and graduate researchers have spent decades analyzing and improving data center thermal efficiency. Their work is the primary reason modern facilities operate with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) near \approx 1.1\text{–}1.2—meaning only 10\%\text{–}20\% of facility energy goes to cooling overhead.
The remaining issue is not a lack of academic research, but the physical reality that reclaiming huge volumes of lukewarm (40 °C) heat is thermodynamically difficult and expensive to monetize without adjacent municipal district infrastructure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Villeneuve Myth 1: Data centers are completely automated and don’t create local jobs.
The Myth: People often assume that once a massive data center is built, it runs entirely on its own with a handful of remote engineers, offering little to no economic benefit to the host community. Myth 2: Data centers deplete local water supplies and leave communities dry.
The Myth: It is frequently stated that all data centers consume massive quantities of municipal drinking water continuously through traditional cooling towers.Myth 3: Data centers automatically make residential electricity bills skyrocket.
The Myth: A common belief is that data centers place an uncompensated burden on the local grid, forcing everyday residents to shoulder higher energy costs. Myth 4: Data centers are dead-weight energy hogs that offer zero grid value.
The Myth: Data centers are viewed solely as massive power sinks that drain energy resources without giving anything back. Myth 5: Data centers are whisper-quiet and invisible neighbors.
The Myth: Because data centers look like standard commercial warehouses, people often assume they have little to no environmental presence outside their walls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
water is used to cool the data centres. They can use open loop water that constantly pumps cold water in and hot water out removing the heat. They usually also use closed loop systems with coolant like in a car, this pumps water around a closed loop. They do need to periodically empty the closed loop and flush the system with cleaning chemicals to stop salt/ mineral build up.
The water volume is not an issue, it’s way over-hyped in the media because AI is the new technology. The chemicals are a global issue, although data centres are a small part of this issue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
So how many gallons of water do they use a day? Im curious because toilets alone use 3.5-4.1 billion gallons of water just here in America per day. Thats not including sinks, showers, washing machines and dishwashers. You can add another 15 billion gallons onto that. Agriculture uses the most at 118 Billion gallons of water a day. Again this is all just in America. With that information, Data Centers dont even use 1 billion gallons of water per day.
Stop stressing because you cant comprehend numbers. Food is important, housing is important, clean water in important. But we cant get that without education, and right now I guarantee you cant find a human smarter than AI. Welcome to the future!!
Tomi Engdahl says:
there are other ways to cool the data centers. They are already found. You can save 98-99% or more water compared to legacy coolin designs.
And those are already in use in most new data centers – especially outside USA.
The data centers less than 1% of water consuming problem has been solved by engineers.
Now put the effort to how the rest over 99% of water is used, and is there is possible to reduce it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“there’s fresh water shortages happening everywhere on the planet.”
Your claim is partially false. Not everywhere but in quite many places.
The claim reflects a fundamental confusion between the physics of water as a resource and the logistics of local access.
“Nope you’ll never convince me that we have enough water…not when it’s a non renewable resource”
Whether water is considered “renewable” comes down to a distinction between Earth’s total, closed system and regional human consumption.
From a physical and chemical standpoint, water on Earth is a closed, continuously renewed system driven by solar energy.
The reason people feel water is “non-renewable” is that human society often withdraws fresh water faster than the natural cycle can replenish it in specific locations.
The world is not “running out” of water molecules; it is facing a distribution, pollution, and management crisis.
Humanity relies heavily on tiny fraction (1.2%) of surface water and shallow groundwater.
When pollution, urban expansion, or drought contaminates or strains local rivers, the local supply of usable fresh water drops—even though the global water molecule count remains unchanged.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hot Commodity
Data Centers Causing Huge Temperature Spikes for Miles Around Them, Study Suggests
Not very cool.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-centers-temperature-spikes?fbclid=IwVERDUAVEHnhleHRuA2FlbQIxMABwZG9mBXNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHlu3mzvtvnm3Xl22kRU-ZqLa1KtVZN4UeqMAqIyKHHqLyIUCwTCeX16XZxRR_aem_D19-PBZ6YGbtRBA1ZRovZA
Tomi Engdahl says:
US restarts three shut-down nuclear reactors to feed AI data centers — 2.25 GW coming online with backing from Microsoft and Google
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/us-takes-unprecedented-step-of-recommissioning-nuclear-plants-due-to-ai-power-demand-2-25-gw-currently-on-tap-from-refurbished-reactors?fbclid=IwdGRjcAVEtb9jbGNrBUS1nmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHBkb2YFc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEefA1GdQBE0UwhZ7TSm7k-LmpznO25G1juA6v2vUsTnAqAYK2ZvnV-HBHuxJA_aem_8l_KLG0eQz1DOg9xkNUwsQ
The current and expected power draw of AI data centers has been the subject of strong discussion, but today, there appears to be some good news. Three U.S. nuclear reactors are being restarted after many years offline, expected to bring 2.25 GW total to the grid. According to a report, the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa are getting a fresh set of proverbial tires to get rolling again.