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.
1,309 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
A modern 100 MW to 300 MW hyperscale facility genuinely dumps enough thermal energy to rival a small modular reactor (SMR) or power station.
The primary reason power plants can use high-pressure steam turbines to generate electricity is temperature quality (Carnot Efficiency), not just raw heat quantity.
The Temperature Gap: Power plants burn fossil fuels or split atoms to create superheated, high-pressure steam running at 300°C to 500°C+ under massive pressure (100–200+ bar). That extreme thermal gradient is what allows a steam turbine to spin efficiently.
The Low-Grade Problem: Silicon computer chips will instantly fry if they get anywhere near that hot. They operate safely at internal silicon temperatures of 60°C to 85°C, meaning the exhaust air or liquid cooling loops coming out of a data center are typically sitting at a tepid 35°C to 55°C (and rarely break 65°C even with direct-to-chip liquid cooling).
According to the Carnot efficiency limit, trying to run a steam turbine or organic Rankine cycle (ORC) on low-grade, sub-100°C waste heat yields an electrical conversion efficiency of only about 3% to 7%.
Trying to capture a tiny sliver of parasitic power from low-grade heat is economically and mechanically unviable.
Instead of trying to generate electricity from low-grade heat, modern engineering skips the turbine middleman and routes that warm water directly into district heating networks (like those used in Finland), where it can be used for space heating or domestic hot water at near 100% thermal utility rather than single-digit electrical conversion.
Industrial Heat Cascading: Rather than trying to step down to electricity via a turbine, engineers step sideways into district heating. By using industrial heat pumps to boost a data center’s 45°C water up to 80°C, cities can use that thermal load directly for municipal district heating grids—completely bypassing the need to burn fossil fuels for local district heat.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can You Catch the Vapor with a “Condensation Pipe” Method?
The idea of placing condensation recapture structures above exhaust vents to catch moisture and recycle it back into the system sounds clever, but it runs straight into a mass-balance reality check.
Once water turns to vapor and mixes with the ambient atmosphere over a massive industrial footprint, its vapor pressure drops drastically. To recapture it, you would need colossal, ultra-cold condenser arrays towering over the facility to pull ambient humidity back out of the air—essentially building an energy-intensive dehumidification plant.
You cannot catch vapor via a simple pipe collection method unless you actively re-cool and condense massive volumes of outdoor air, which would consume more electrical energy (and water) than the system would recover.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fact check:
A lot of clean water use – false for data centers in Finland
Uses a lot of electricity – true
Warms environment – depends on cooling used, if all waste heat is reused for district heating, on those months the other houses need heating, practically zero extra heating for environment
Is this project able to get the heat resumed is still a question. Some plans for heat reuse fail. There are many successful data center waste heat reuse for district heating projects. They have reduced need to burn lots of fossil fuel to heat up building in the cities.
If no sensible reuse of waste heat that reduces other heat generation, then nearby environment will heat up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JJXEhFr6o/
Finland’s city-scale energy recycling system captures excess thermal energy from underground and surface data centers and injects it directly into municipal district-heating networks.
How the System Works
• Underground Facilities: Many data centers are built 30 to 100 meters underground in old bomb shelters or abandoned granite mines, using the natural rock for cooling and insulation.
• Heat Recovery & Boosting: Liquid-cooled servers transfer heat into water loops. Specialized heat pump stations—such as those operated by Helen in Helsinki or Fortum in Espoo—raise the captured temperatures to roughly 70–90°C.
• Grid Integration: The heated water is piped into municipal networks to warm homes, businesses, and public buildings, while cooled water is cycled back to the data centers.
Key Impact & Scale
• Helsinki & Espoo: Projects led by tech companies like Microsoft and Google partnering with local utilities supply significant portions of regional heating demand (e.g., meeting up to 40% of demand in areas like Espoo and tens of thousands of homes in Helsinki).
• Emissions Reduction: The system displaces fossil fuels, saving hundreds of thousands of tons of CO₂ annually and significantly cutting heating costs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You cannot deplete water globally.
You cannot deplete water when you look at local situation near data center.
Evaporative cooling: Water cools datacenter and evaporates into the air and condenses into clouds. Clouds rain water on the earth and comes down again, but at different location (usually few hundred kilometers or miles away from data center). It is a cycle at large scale.
At local view there can be more water used (and evaporated) than what rains back to area. So the water resources can be depleted. This trends has been going on in many areas in USA for a long time before the data center building boom started.
Closed loop cooling: Piping is filled typically with water + glycol mixture, and that circulates on the pipe system without leaving it for many years. Compared to evaporative cooling, you use same amount of water either for one day cooling or use the same amount of water many years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The water data centres use up is for evaporative air conditioning for the building, not direct cooling for the servers. Most people don’t realise this. Evaporative air conditioning is used simply because it’s cheap, not because it’s necessary.
Tomi Engdahl says:
There are roughly 3 times more golf courses in the U.S. than there are data centers.
Golf courses consuming vastly more water nationally. Golf courses consume roughly 30 times more water directly on site (around 531 billion gallons) than data centers do directly for cooling (17.4 billion gallons).
This means that an average golf course consumes 10 times more water than an average data center!
Combined (Direct + Indirect) Comparison: Even if you bundle a data center’s direct on-site evaporation plus the off-site water evaporated at power plants to feed their electrical load (\sim228 billion gallons total), U.S. golf courses still consume more than double (~2.4x) that total amount.