Irish data centers consumed a quarter of the country's electricity last year, almost as much as every home in the country combined.

New figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that data center electricity consumption rose to 7,663 GWh in 2025 from 6,973 GWh in 2024 – a 10% rise – to hit 23% of the national total.

For comparison, 2025 consumption stood at 18% for urban households and 9% for rural households. Consumption by all users other than data centers, including residential and other business customers, went up by just 2% over the same period.

The figures represent the latest phase in what's been a continuous rise. The CSO's quarterly tracking from 2015 to 2025 shows that data center electricity consumption grew from 291 GWh in the first quarter of 2015 to 1,991 GWh in the fourth quarter of last year.

Total metered electricity consumption rose 34% during the period, the officials noted.

"Newly compiled quarterly figures spanning 2015 to 2025 highlight a substantial increase in metered electricity consumption by data centers," said Dr Grzegorz Głaczyński, statistician in the Climate and Energy Division.

"Data center consumption has grown every single year without exception, more than doubling between 2015 and 2019 from 1,240 GWh to 2,490 GWh, and tripling again between 2019 and 2025, reaching 7,663 GWh."

Ireland is a data center haven

Despite its size, Ireland currently has more than 80 data centers, mostly in the Greater Dublin Area.

In 2021, the country introduced an effective moratorium on the building of new data center connections to the electricity grid, which remained in force until late last year.

Developers were required to either generate their own electricity on site, or relocate to regions outside the Greater Dublin Area.

Even during the moratorium, data center electricity consumption continued to rise steadily, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicting two years ago that it would represent a third of the country's electricity consumption by this year.

Now, under a new Large Energy Users (LEU) Connection Policy finalized late last year, the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU) requires new data centers to meet at least 80% of their energy demand from renewable sources.

This requires large data center developers to provide 100% on-site, flexible power generation, with at least 80% of annual electricity to be sourced from new, unsubsidized renewable projects within their first six years.

At the same time, a new Large Energy User Action Plan (LEAP) was introduced to encourage investment in energy intensive sectors such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, precision engineering, and hyperscale data centers.

The plan calls for data centers to be sited in green energy parks and co-located with renewable energy sources, including offshore wind.

It also allows developments outside these locations, however, in some cases until beyond 2030, in line with existing planning arrangements. One such area is Dublin, which has raised concerns among opposition parties.

These plans were subject to a fierce cross-party pushback last year, as ITPro reported at the time, largely due to concerns about the impact on local communities and the environment.

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Three-quarters of utility firms are struggling to forecast energy demands due to rapid data center infrastructure expansion.

A new study from Capgemini Research Institute suggests that eight-in-ten utilities predict more extreme and volatile demand patterns. A key factor here is that consumption patterns from AI are less stable and more difficult to model.

The biggest problem is uncertainty, the study noted, with utilities increasingly forced to plan for demand that may never materialize.

Two-thirds of electricity executives refer to “phantom” data center load requests - with 19% of these never materializing.

This forecasting uncertainty creates real problems with capital allocation, Capgemini warned, with utilities having to decide not only how much capacity to invest in, but where and when to prioritize grid modernization investments to support future demand.

Hyperscalers are feeling the pinch

Things are just as bad for hyperscalers, which need to make major infrastructure decisions against a backdrop of uncertain demand forecasts, grid availability, and connection timelines.

The problem is made all the harder by the geographic concentration of data centers, which places significant strain on local grids.

More than half of electricity executives are finding that load concentration is a major obstacle to reliable service, while large clusters of high-density facilities are creating localized bottlenecks that affect system stability and investment planning.

“AI is transforming electricity systems far beyond demand growth. It is exposing structural constraints in grid capacity, planning, and power availability, while making demand more dynamic and harder to predict,” said Claire Gauthier, global head of energy & utilities at Capgemini.

“The challenge is no longer only how much power is needed, but whether it can be delivered reliably, where and when it is required. Utilities have a defining role to play as system orchestrators, leveraging AI-enabled insights to balance grid and customer-owned resources, accelerate deliverable capacity, and enable the next phase of data-center growth.”

What’s driving energy consumption?

The projected increase in electricity consumption is largely down to AI training and inferencing, according to Capgemini.

Training and inference processes currently account for around 25% of data center energy consumption, yet this is projected to reach 60% within the next three to five years.

The consultancy noted that this not only places significant strain on data center infrastructure, but also leaves other IT workloads on the sidelines as enterprises prioritize AI-related activities.

Data centers are increasingly shifting from backup-only approaches toward primary behind-the-meter (BTM) and near-site solutions. Nearly three-in-ten say they already deploy on-site power solutions and 39% plan to add on-site/BTM within the next couple of years.

Operating independently

Looking ahead, the majority (86%) of respondents see the ability to operate independently from the grid as a competitive advantage.

Around three-quarters of utilities and data center executives told researchers they were looking to try and establish a diversified energy mix to ensure reliability and long-term resilience.

Part of this lies in the fact that renewable energy alone cannot provide enough continuous power at scale for large data centers and AI workloads.

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are emerging as a possible solution, with nuclear Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) expected to take time to deploy.

More than two-thirds of electricity and data center executives globally are looking to natural gas as a near‑term, transitional solution until renewable energy and storage technologies can scale.

"For both energy providers and data-center operators, the key challenge is no longer only scaling capacity, but doing so under uncertainty, speed constraints, and rising system complexity,” said Gauthier.

“Success will depend on the ability to align infrastructure investment, energy sourcing, and AI-enabled operations to manage both the scale and volatility of demand, while balancing reliability, cost, and sustainability.”

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Energy costs are already holding back AI, with one-in-five UK firms moving their AI operations overseas to dodge prices.

That's according to a survey from CUDO Compute, which found 20% of British companies polled had moved some workloads out of the country over rising energy costs.

Data center energy costs have long been a concern when it comes to the AI, in part due to aging grid infrastructure constraining capacity for a technology that has heavy power demands.

Last month, Google's president said the US needed to step up power generation to meet skyrocketing demands.

Energy costs in the UK specifically have become a key talking point amid infrastructure expansion plans. Earlier this month, OpenAI cited energy costs as a key factor behind its decision to pause the Stargate UK infrastructure scheme.

CUDO Compute's survey of 700 AI decision makers found a third of respondents said energy costs are limiting their ability to scale AI operations, with 42% adding that high energy and infrastructure costs are fuelling concerns around an AI bubble.

"AI is not abstract software. It is physical infrastructure that depends on power, land, cooling and grid access," said Matt Hawkins, CEO of CUDO Compute.

"When those constraints tighten, economics take over. If it is cheaper or easier to run workloads elsewhere, they will move, regardless of sovereignty ambitions."

The report notes that infrastructure is the key to enabling AI growth, with access to land, affordable energy, and scalable compute all potentially constraining growth.

"Right now, every UK boardroom is talking about AI, but almost nobody is talking about the infrastructure needed to power it," said Hawkins.

"Until we close that gap, there will continue to be a disconnect between policy, ambition and reality. The countries that solve this first will shape the future of AI, and the UK still has a window to lead, but it needs to act quickly."

The report predicts $600 billion in capex spend by hyperscalers this year, up from $400bn last year. But as data centers are quickly built to enable AI, campaigners and local residents continue to push back against data centres in their neighbourhoods, criticizing pollution, emissions and water use.

Sovereign AI ambitions

Energy costs aren't the only reason companies are thinking about shifting their AI workloads: AI sovereignty and data center sovereignty are also major concerns.

The European Commission yesterday backed €180 million to procure sovereign cloud services for EU institutions for the next six years, amid a wider push for digital sovereignty.

In the CUDO Compute survey, a third of respondents said they were "actively considering" moving workloads over geopolitical pressures, with 45% of those in the UK saying data or digital sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and national security were driving decisions on deployment strategy, higher than 33% in Europe.

One-in-three Brits surveyed say they are prioritizing regionally controlled compute — even if it costs the company more.

"AI sovereignty is being hotly discussed as a priority for UK organisations, but it only works if the infrastructure exists to support it," said Hawkins. "What we are seeing is a growing tension between where businesses want to run AI and where they actually can."

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Data center operators should admit whether infrastructure projects will lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and impact the UK's net zero ambitions, campaigners have told the government.

A group of environmental and social justice activists have written to the UK technology secretary Liz Kendall saying the build-out to power AI could disrupt plans to decarbonize the country's electricity grid.

Because of that, new projects should be forced by the government to show how projects won't lead to an increase in emissions or cause water shortages.

At the moment, the UK government is working on a national policy statement (NPS) on data centers. Activist groups including Foxglove and Friends of the Earth would like that document to include a framework to assess the broader environmental impact of data centers.

This would include assessments of water and power use, Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, as well as the introduction of new rules aimed at banning data centers from increasing emissions or water scarcity.

Campaigners expect the NPS to be published for consultation in the coming months, but hundreds of new data center development projects are already underway.

“Without these commitments, such vast electricity use will inevitably generate vast climate emissions,” the campaigners said in a letter to Kendall and shared with ITPro.

The call for stricter environmental and energy rules for data centers comes amid a massive rush to build infrastructure to power national AI ambitions.

On both sides of the Atlantic, national and local governments have faced significant pushback from campaigners over the environmental and economic impact on local communities.

Stricter data center rules needed

Campaigners want the requirements to apply to major data centers above 1MW, noting that AI infrastructure's demands differ from previous designs.

"The new generation of ‘hyperscale’ data centers currently being planned across the UK are on a very different scale to the facilities in place today," the letter noted, pointing to plans for infrastructure in Elsham in Lincolnshire and Cambois in Northumberland, which will each have a demand for electricity of 1GW.

"By way of context, the peak winter electricity demand for the entirety of the UK is around 47GW.”

"This additional demand – unless meaningfully matched with new, renewable energy generation and storage – poses a serious threat to efforts to decarbonize the UK’s electricity grid," the letter said.

Google's proposed data center in Essex, for example, could lead to a “net increase in GHG emissions of 568,727 tonnes CO2е per year during the operational phase”, according to the company’s planning documents.

To avoid increasing emissions, data center developers should prove how they will increase renewable energy supply – by building generation or by funding it – and to fully describe how cooling systems will work.

"Measures to prevent the use of ‘greenwashing’ in claiming the data center is carbon-neutral, for example through the purchase of renewable energy certificates or the use of power purchase agreements which do not result in the construction of additional generating capacity," they added.

The letter was also signed by Global Justice Now, Global Action Plan, Opportunity Green, and the Green Web Foundation.

Government response

Whether the government listens to such concerns remains to be seen, but signs suggest environmental and energy impact of this infrastructure build-out is raising concerns, at least for some politicians.

Indeed, MPs last week launched an inquiry into the environmental impact of data centers in the UK, in particular energy and water use.

In response, energy secretary Ed Miliband last week said the UK's grid decarbonization efforts should already mitigate any emissions from increased electricity demand, but admitted that energy use from data centers remains "inherently uncertain."

A government spokesperson told the Guardian that such data centers would help boost the economy and address environmental issues, too.

"Datacenters will increasingly be powered by renewables and our AI energy council is exploring opportunities to attract investment in new clean power sources for the industry, while the planning system takes water scarcity into account," the spokesperson added.

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Microsoft has revealed all of its global electricity consumption is now matched by renewable energy generation.

In 2020, the firm said it aimed to be carbon negative by 2030, setting a target of “renewable matching” by 2025, whereby consumption is offset by production of renewable energy.

"Since our carbon negative announcement in 2020, we have contracted 40 gigawatts of new renewable energy supply across 26 countries, working with more than 95 utilities and developers across 400-plus contracts and counting," the company confirmed in a blog post penned by chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa and Noelle Walsh, president of cloud operations and innovation.

"To put that amount in perspective — that’s enough energy to power about 10 million US homes. Of that contracted volume, 19 GW are now online, delivering new clean energy supply to the power grid, while the remainder are slated to come online over the next five years."

From its first 110 MW renewable power purchase agreement in 2013, Microsoft has grown to become one of the world's largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy.

The tech giant has now contracted 40 GW of renewable energy, with 19 GW currently online and operational. The remaining 21 GW is scheduled to become available within the next five years.

According to Microsoft, environmental benefits include the reduction of its reported Scope 2 carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 25 million tons.

How Microsoft sources renewable energy

Microsoft has sourced its clean energy through multiple requests for proposal or information, bilateral engagements, and clean tariffs to evaluate over 5,000 unique carbon-free energy projects around the world.

"Today, Microsoft has six energy company partners with which we have over 1 GW of contracted renewable energy capacity, and more than 20 energy supplier partners where each partner has at least five separate renewable energy projects with Microsoft — evidence of the durable, repeatable relationships necessary to scale clean energy," said Nakagawa and Walsh.

"Our renewable energy procurement has mobilized billions of dollars in private investment, supported thousands of jobs across the communities where we operate and delivered meaningful co-benefits."

The company said it will continue with its carbon reduction strategies, adding to its portfolio of renewable energy resources. This, it said, will include nuclear energy, next-generation grid infrastructure, and carbon capture technology.

Microsoft revealed it also plans to build and leverage new AI-driven tools to design, permit, and deploy new power technologies. The company recently announced collaborations with Idaho National Laboratory and the Midcontinental System Operator.

According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) data, renewable energy generation has expanded nearly four-fold since 2000. In many markets around the world, clean energy is one of the fastest-growing sources of power and often the one with the fastest time-to-market.

"Corporate buyers like Microsoft continue to serve as an important catalyst in driving commercial demand for innovation and infrastructure across the power industry," said Nakagawa and Walsh.

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Efforts by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to expand data center infrastructure across Europe face severe delays due to sluggish grid connection practices, a senior company figure claims.

In a recent interview with Reuters, Pamela MacDougall, AWS’ head of energy markets for EMEA, said the length of time it takes to get a connection to energy grids had become a major factor when deciding where to invest in new infrastructure.

Indeed, she said delays in Europe had hampered plans by the company to build data centers in high-demand regions, warning that delays were “challenging our growth aspirations."

"There's a misalignment. We want to expand and grow within two years,” MacDougall said. However, the AWS exec noted that grid connections can take up to seven years in Europe.

Last year, power constrains forced AWS to reportedly scrap plans for an industrial plant in Ballycoolin, Ireland that was going to build server racks.

Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that securing a grid connection ranges from two to ten years, depending on the country. MacDougall added that the problems weren't limited to a few countries.

"We're finding more and more across Europe that certainty of the delivery date has continued to be delayed."

An AWS spokesperson told ITPro it’s charging with plans to "rapidly expand its infrastructure across Europe, with ongoing investments in edge locations and data center regions in more than 20 countries”.

“We remain committed to expanding at pace to meet growing customer demand,” the spokesperson added.

Figures published as part of Amazon's Q3 2025 earnings report revealed the firm had added more than 3.8 gigawatts of power in the 12 months prior. The spokesperson told ITPro it plans to continue adding capacity across 2026 and into 2027.

AWS isn’t alone in grid woes

The IEA noted last year that the data center project pipeline equals 130% of existing capacity – but based on its own modelling, capacity will likely grow by just 70% because of delays and power constraints.

One solution is building data centers in regions with existing grid capacity, rather than focusing on existing hubs as is normally the case. The IEA added that smart grid tech can help boost capacity while battery systems can help balance demand, but noted that further investment in transmission infrastructure remains necessary.

Indeed, it's not just Europe that is struggling to keep up with data center power demands. The US is also facing "significant concerns" over the impact of data center growth on regional energy grids.

In the UK, the situation is much the same. In 2024, former National Grid CEO John Pettigrew called for "bold action" to boost energy infrastructure to keep up with surging power demands.

"Future growth in foundational technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will mean larger scale, energy-intensive computing infrastructure," Pettigrew told attendees at the Aurora Spring Forum in Oxford.

This predicament for big tech shows no signs of improving any time soon, either, and experts have warned aging energy grids could pose a serious challenge to ambitious infrastructure projects.

Two-fifths of data centers have faced power constraints, according to research from Gartner, while analysis by McKinsey projects data center energy demands to triple by the end of the decade.

Big tech courts alternative energy sources

Big tech companies such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google have all been exploring alternative energy sources to power infrastructure projects.

While renewables have been a long-term focus for cloud computing providers, the advent of generative AI – and the associated pressure on data center infrastructure – brought nuclear power back into vogue.

AWS, for example, shelled out $650 million for a data center co-located with a nuclear power plant – though the project faced significant pushback from regulators.

Elsewhere, Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with energy provider Constellation in a move that will power data centers with nuclear energy.

The partnership involves the reopening of ‘Unit 1’ of the ‘Three Mile Island’ site in Pennsylvania.

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How much energy does it take for Gemini to respond to a user prompt? Google says it’s less than you might think.

One of the challenges of generative AI is how much energy is required to power the data centers needed to run a model to answer a question, generate some text, and so on.

Unpicking that isn't easy, but early reports suggested that using OpenAI's ChatGPT for search was ten-times more energy intensive than using plain-old Google, though CEO Sam Altman has since confirmed it's about 0.034 watt-hours (Wh) of energy.

That said, it's an easier question for Google researchers to answer than their academic peers, what with the access to the company's own systems. Researchers at the tech giant looked at the full stack of infrastructure that underpins its Gemini AI range, detailing their findings in a recent technical paper.

The wide-ranging study examined “active AI accelerator power, host system energy, idle machine capacity, and data center energy overhead".

All told, the average text prompt in Gemini Apps uses 0.24 watt-hours of energy – a figure the company is keen to point out is "substantially lower than many public estimates".

Elsewhere, a single prompt emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent and consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, about five drops.

This, researchers said in a separate blog post, is equivalent to “watching TV for less than nine seconds".

So how does Gemini stack up to a traditional Google search? According to reports from MIT Technology Review, 58% of the energy demand of running a prompt was from AI chips, with the CPU and memory of a server taking up another 25%.

A further 8% is from cooling, power conversion, and other data center overheads, with 10% attributed to backup equipment.

In comparison, running a Google search uses an average 0.0003kWh or 0.03 Wh, which suggests that running a Gemini text prompt is on par with – or even more energy efficient than – a basic search, and roughly on par with OpenAI's figures.

Google study comes with a catch

It's worth noting these figures are just for using an AI model. Training AI models also consumes huge amounts of energy, as does building and running the data centers needed to do host AI models and various assorted workloads.

That's why Google's emissions are up 51% over the last five years — it posted a 22% in Scope 3 emissions, specifically highlighting data center capacity delivery as a major hurdle to curbing emissions.

The tech giant isn't alone in assessing the environmental impact of its AI models, either. Last month, Mistral unveiled its own sustainability auditing tool that included insights on model training as well as 18 months of use.

The French AI company found that the training phase alone used the same amount of water as 5,100 citizens annually and 20.4 kilotons of carbon dioxide.

By leaving out the training phase, Google isn't including a huge part of the broader impact of these systems. Plus, as Google admitted, the data hasn't been independently verified and could change as new models are added.

Beyond that, it's also notable that this specifically refers to a text prompt in the Gemini App, not more energy intensive queries like deep research using more advanced models or image generation, for example.

Working to slash AI's impact on the environment

Google said that improvements to hardware and software had helped reduce the energy required by Gemini systems, pointing to improvements in the Transformer model architecture, more efficient algorithms, and custom-built hardware.

"We continuously refine the algorithms that power our models with methods like Accurate Quantized Training (AQT) to maximize efficiency and reduce energy consumption for serving, without compromising response quality," the post said, adding:

"Our latest-generation TPU, Ironwood, is 30x more energy-efficient than our first publicly-available TPU and far more power-efficient than general-purpose CPUs for inference."

Because of such efforts, Google insisted the average demand from a Gemini App text prompt fell by 33x in terms of energy and 44x in terms of carbon footprint in the last year.

"While the impact of a single prompt is low compared to many daily activities, the immense scale of user adoption globally means that continued focus on reducing the environmental cost of AI is imperative," the report noted, calling for other AI companies to follow suit with similar data sets.

"We advocate for the widespread adoption of this or similarly comprehensive measurement frameworks to ensure that as the capabilities of AI advance, their environmental efficiency does as well."

The figures may be better than expected, but the heavy use of these AI tools — not to mention the environmental cost of building data centers and training models — still represent a threat to power grids.

Data center energy demands are growing rapidly worldwide, with the International Energy Agency warning that AI will use the same amount of power annually as Japan by 2030.

Behavioral shifts on the part of consumers – and more information from providers – could be key to reducing the broader energy impact of AI.

Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that users are needlessly wasting compute power just by being polite to the chatbot.

In a thread on X, Altman revealed users saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in response to ChatGPT cost the company millions of dollars a year.

Altman added that it’s “tens of millions of dollars well spent”.

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Microsoft has made no secret of the surging energy requirements required by its mushrooming AI infrastructure, and its latest attempt to improve sustainability stinks of greenwashing.

The company recently signed a deal with Vaulted Deep, a waste management company that, in its own words, turns “excess organic material into permanent carbon removal”.

Vaulted Deep will bury upwards of 4.9 million metric tonnes of waste deep underground. This largely comes from manure, sewage, and assorted “agricultural byproducts” that can’t be reused or contain harmful chemicals.

Simply put, the tech giant is burying poop to offset emissions – and it really is a perfect way to sum up the generative AI boom.

Energy consumption and emissions at Microsoft are skyrocketing amid the sharpened focus on the technology. In May, the company’s annual sustainability report showed its carbon emissions are soaring.

In a blog post dissecting the report, Microsoft President Brad Smith revealed the firm’s total emissions – including Scope 1, 2, and 3 – increased by 23.4% compared to its 2020 baseline due to AI and cloud expansion.

That baseline refers to greenhouse gas emissions which Microsoft uses as a marker in its 2020 commitment to become carbon negative by 2030, which at this stage has taken a few knocks.

Energy use also shot up by 168% last year, according to the report, but Smith was keen to point out that shows its efforts to improve sustainability are working given the disparity between emissions and overall usage.

Microsoft is burying waste - and its head in the sand

Generative AI is power hungry, to say the least, and the insatiable demand for services is placing huge strain on data center infrastructure globally.

The soaring power consumption rates have reached such a point that grid operators in Europe are struggling and scrambling to upgrade grid infrastructure. Data center water consumption, the often-unseen aspect of the problem, is causing serious problems for local communities.

Meta’s data center in Georgia, for example, is allegedly sucking the earth dry and limiting supply to local residents.

To its credit, at least Microsoft is doing something – it could always just shrug off concerns and criticism. In April, the firm signed a deal with carbon capture company AtmosClear to remove nearly 7 million tonnes of carbon emissions.

A similar deal with Chestnut Carbon, meanwhile, will see seven million metric tonnes of carbon offset through reforestation in the United States.

Elsewhere, infrastructure improvements have also been a key focus for the tech giant. These include novel data center cooling techniques and the use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) in data center construction to reduce its reliance on steel and concrete – both of which are large contributors to carbon emissions.

These are all positive moves, no doubt. But the volume and frequency of ‘partnerships’ and new-fangled attempts to offset emissions just reek of greenwashing and token gestures to prove they’re actually mindful of the effect they’re having on the environment.

Weigh the carbon removal numbers against Microsoft’s yearly emissions – around 15 million tonnes in FY24, per its 2025 sustainability report – and they don’t look so significant.

Moreover, perhaps I missed it, but Microsoft and counterparts also weren’t exactly bending over backwards before the generative AI boom to plant millions of trees or bury excrement thousands of feet underground.

It’s clear they’ve bit off more than they can chew with the beast they’ve unleashed on the industry. So now they’re scrambling.

Everyone’s looking for a quick fix

In an announcement confirming the deal with Vaulted Deep, Brian Marrs, senior director of energy and carbon removal at Microsoft, said this will provide a “differentiated, scalable approach to permanent carbon removal”.

"Its work delivers immediate climate benefits while stimulating local economies and addresses long-standing environmental challenges that communities face every day,” he said.

Cutting through the mind-numbing corporate jargon we’ve come to expect from big tech companies, the “immediate benefits” comment stands out here and speaks volumes about how Microsoft - and its counterparts in the industry - view the topic of sustainability.

They’re looking for a quick fix, because they’ve dived headlong into generative AI without considering the long-term impact. Sustainability and net zero were cool and trendy in 2020 when the company set its ‘baseline’ and pledged to reach carbon negativity by the end of the decade.

But AI has become such a moneyspinner for the industry that they can’t slow down at this stage or else be eclipsed by a competitor – and that would impact shareholder value, which of course is paramount.

Microsoft and friends have bombarded us with an array of ambitious plans to meet surging energy demands. From reopening nuclear power stations to geothermal energy projects and development of small modular reactors (SMRs).

At this stage it seems like they’re just throwing money at any conceivable idea to pad the numbers and catch headlines.

Google emissions continue to climb amid the AI boom, new figures show, up 51% from 2019 to 2024 and 11% in the last year alone.

The tech giant’s total carbon dioxide emissions reached 11.5 million tonnes last year, according to its annual environmental report, marking a steep increase on the 7.6 million tonnes recorded in 2019.

A key factor behind this increase lies in the huge strain placed on data center infrastructure by generative AI - and it’s an issue that Google isn’t alone in tackling.

The International Energy Agency warned that AI will chew through the same amount of energy as Japan by 2030, with emissions from leading AI companies up by 150% since 2020.

There are different types of emissions, and Google has made headway in curtailing impact across a number of areas. Scope 1, for example, refers to sources that a company directly owns, such as buildings.

Google cut this type by 8% year-on-year, the report noted. Meanwhile, Scope 2 refers to indirect emissions from energy used by the company; those fell by 11%.

Scope 3 refers to supply-chain emissions, which climbed 22% year-on-year — and they make up 73% of Google's carbon footprint.

Google said that the increase in Scope 3 emissions were "primarily due to increases in data center capacity delivery (i.e., emissions generated from the manufacturing and assembly of technical infrastructure hardware — including for AI — and their logistics, as well as from data center construction)."

The company said it would continue to build out infrastructure next year and aimed to "decouple this growth from a proportional increase in emissions", in part by encouraging clean electricity in the supply chain and shifting to low-carbon data center construction.

Google emissions are being addressed

Still, the company highlighted its progress. Notably, it slashed data center energy emissions by 12%, with Google data centers using 84% less overhead energy than the industry average.

In a blog post examining the report, Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer at the tech giant, said that despite a 27% increase in electricity demand for data centers, the company has “successfully decoupled our operational energy growth from its associated carbon emissions.

"This was largely due to more than 25 clean energy projects we’d contracted over the past several years — some as far back as 2019 — coming online in 2024.

Google also claimed that its products more than made up for its own emissions, noting that the combined emissions savings for 2024 alone from Nest thermostats, Google Earth Pro, Solar API, Google Maps' fuel efficient routing, and Green Light was 26 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent — more than double Google's own tally.

Cleaner energy required

Brandt admitted that "it's important to be up front about the hurdles we're facing", highlighting that total admissions were up 11% year on year.

She pinned the blame on slower progress with decarbonizing energy in some key regions, notably Asia Pacific, and said challenges remain with newer forms of energy production.

"When it comes to the next-generation clean technologies we need — the solutions that go beyond wind and solar like enhanced geothermal, advanced nuclear, nuclear fusion, and more — they’re still in their early stages," she added. "They’re not yet deployed at the scale required and can remain expensive to get online."

Google has teamed up with various energy companies on smaller modular reactors and other advanced nuclear, as well as geothermal and biomass, the report noted.

In last year's version of this research, Google saw a 13% increase year-on-year for GHG emissions and a 48% increase since 2019, with the report noting: "This result was primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions."

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The energy demand of AI data centers will top that of Japan by the end of the decade, new research shows – and that’s providing that energy grids can even keep up.

A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which sought to quantify the impact of AI on energy networks, noted that investment in data centers has nearly doubled since 2022, with data center electricity use up by 12% since 2017.

That's set to double by 2030, largely driven by the rise of AI as the tech industry steams ahead with adoption.

"Global electricity demand from data centers is set to more than double over the next five years, consuming as much electricity by 2030 as the whole of Japan does today," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

Varied demand

The IEA report noted that a typical AI data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households — but the largest under construction now may chew through 20 times as much.

However, the report noted that data centers are just one driver behind the growth of global electricity demand, making up about one-tenth of that demand — less than industrial motors, air conditioning, and electric vehicles.

Developing economies may see less impact from data centers, as their electricity demand growth was already high; advanced economies, which had largely stagnant electricity demand, will experience a more dramatic impact.

"The effects will be particularly strong in some countries," Birol added. "For example, in the United States, data centers are on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand; in Japan, more than half; and in Malaysia, as much as one-fifth."

The report noted that in the US, by the end of the decade, data centers will use more electricity than aluminum, steel, cement, chemicals, and all other energy-intensive goods combined.

Energy grids are creaking

The IEA warned that strain on electricity grids could delay as many as a fifth of data center projects, noting that there are already long waits for connecting to grids and access to critical grid components such as transformers and cables. For gas generation, turbine deliveries already face lead times of several years.

"If the electricity sector does not step up, there is a risk that meeting data center load growth could entail trade-offs with other goals such as electrification, manufacturing growth or affordability," the IEA said.

This isn’t an issue isolated to the US, either. Last year, the head of the UK’s National Grid warned the country’s energy network was already struggling to keep up with rising demand - and that’s a trend expected to continue across the decade unless major investment is secured to facilitate upgrades.

One solution presented by the IEA included choosing better locations for new data centers, looking for opportunities in areas with power and grid availability.

"Grid operators could also examine incentives to locate data centers in areas where grids are less constrained," the IEA said. "We find that 50% of data centers under development in the United States are in pre-existing large clusters, potentially raising risks of local bottlenecks.

Beyond those direct concerns, the IEA also warned about security. Attacks on critical national infrastructure have increased rapidly in recent years, and with data centers now representing a crucial cog in the modern economy, the risks are growing.

"Cyber attacks on energy utilities have tripled in the past four years and become more sophisticated because of AI," the IEA said in a post. "At the same time, AI is becoming a critical tool for energy companies to defend against such attacks."

AI could be the curse and the cure

AI could help address some of these challenges by optimizing existing sources, reducing consumption, and boosting grids — such efforts are already in place, with the UK government's AI Energy Council tapping AI leaders including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to help tackle local energy concerns.

The report said that AI-based fault detection could reduce outage durations by 30-50%, while remote sensors paired with AI management could increase the capacity of existing transmission lines.

"Up to 175 gigawatts (GW) of transmission capacity could be unlocked if these tools are applied, without any new lines being built," the report said.

Perhaps highlighting the impact of AI, the IEA also unveiled a new AI agent to help answer questions on the report's contents, though it warns that "AI can make mistakes, and you should verify the answers independently with the original source materials."

MORE FROM ITPRO

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• Europe needs more energy and better grids to meet data center power demands in the age of AI

National Grid Partners, the venture capital and innovation arm of the UK utility firm, has unveiled plans to invest $100 million in AI startups in the energy field.

With pressure on the grid increasing, the investment division is exploring solutions that will help make the grid more efficient, resilient, and dynamic. This means improving efficiency, cutting customer costs, reducing emissions, and ensuring energy security.

"Power systems like National Grid's are seeing unprecedented challenges, with soaring demand driven by data centers and the electrification of heat and transport, as well as requirements for a more flexible grid with the rise of renewables and EVs," said John Pettigrew, CEO of National Grid.

"We are seeing artificial intelligence play a vital role resolving these issues and delivering compelling results across our operations. Scaling AI will continue to help National Grid provide the most efficient, modern grid available for our millions of customers in the US and UK."

The first funding pledge has been granted to Amperon, a provider of AI-powered energy forecasting and analytics solutions aimed at improving grid reliability, managing financial risk, and optimizing renewables.

"As the energy landscape becomes more complex and dynamic, the need for accurate, real-time data and predictive insights has never been more critical," said Raghuram Madabushi, investment director at National Grid Partners.

"Amperon's AI-driven approach to forecasting is a perfect fit with our vision for a smarter, more resilient grid – and this marks the inaugural investment from our new, $100 million commitment to AI solutions advancing our energy system."

National Grid eyes tangible use-cases

National Grid Partners said it's already invested $150 million in 18 AI companies focusing on energy innovation, with more than 80% of its portfolio companies strategically engaged with National Grid business units.

One such is Sensat, which uses AI to help owners of critical infrastructure visualize and collaborate via digital twins, thereby accelerating projects and lowering costs.

The utility giant is currently using the firm’s tech to speed up substation upgrades and connect data centers to the grid.

AI is a mixed blessing when it comes to energy. Late last year, an investigation by Schneider Electric into the possible future of AI’s electricity consumption over the next decade found 'significant concerns' over capacity.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), meanwhile, has forecast that the electricity consumption associated with global data centers will more than double between 2022 and 2026, peaking at over 1,000 TWh next year. That's equivalent to Japan’s national electricity consumption.

Data center operators are concerned about pressure from AI-driven demands, with seven-in-ten IT decision makers recently telling Cadence researchers that energy grids are being pushed to breaking point.

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• Only 13% of firms are tracking AI energy usage
• AI is finally delivering bang for its buck
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Data center energy consumption could be cut by up to 30% simply by changing a few lines of code, according to new research.

Most data centers around the world use the open source operating system Linux, and researchers from Canada's University of Waterloo said this can create efficient data flows, thereby causing energy consumption to increase.

"Information arrives at data centers in ‘packets,’ and then the data center’s front-end, kind of like a receptionist at a front desk, figures out where to send those packets," said professor of computer science Martin Karsten, who led the research.

Karsten noted that through a small change to the Linux kernel, researchers were able to speed up this process and create a more efficient flow.

"We didn’t add anything," he said. "We just rearranged what is done when, which leads to a much better usage of the data center’s CPU caches. It’s kind of like rearranging the pipeline at a manufacturing plant, so that you don’t have people running around all the time."

Karsten teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly, to develop a small section of code – a non-intrusive kernel change of just 30 lines – that would improve Linux’s network traffic processing.

The solution rearranges operations within the Linux networking stack, improving the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking. The change can in some cases increase throughput by up to 45% without compromising tail latency, researchers found.

A feature called ‘interrupt request suspension’ balances CPU power usage with efficient data processing. By reducing unnecessary CPU interruptions during high-traffic periods, this enhances network performance while maintaining low latency during quieter times.

All told, the team claims this could reduce the energy consumption of data center operations by as much as 30%.

The team has tested the solution’s effectiveness and submitted it to Linux, with the code now published as part of Linux’s newest kernel, release version 6.13.

Data center energy consumption is a serious problem

According to a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) last year, data centers currently account for between 2% and 4% of total electricity consumption around the world. In Ireland, it's 20%, placing significant strain on the country’s energy grid.

The IEA also warned that data center electricity usage is expected to rise from 460TWh in 2022 to between 650TWh and 1,050TWh by next year - though it noted that a lack of transparency from the companies makes demand estimates difficult.

"All these big companies – Amazon, Google, Meta – use Linux in some capacity, but they’re very picky about how they decide to use it," said Karsten.

"If they choose to ‘switch on’ our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the internet could be positively affected by this."

Researchers say they have “significant concerns” about the effect rapid growth in data center electricity demand is having on regional energy networks.

Schneider Electric has published an investigation into the possible future of AI’s electricity consumption over the next decade, using system dynamics modeling to forecast scenarios for AI electricity demand in the future.

‘The breadth of AI’s projected electricity demand encompasses a wide array of interconnected issues. These issues range from infrastructure challenges to supply chain disruptions and socio-economic concerns,” the report stated.

It added that while data center electricity use only accounts for 0.3% of worldwide electricity demand at the moment, rapid growth is anticipated globally.

For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected electricity consumption associated with global data center demand to more than double between 2022 and 2026, peaking to over 1,000 TWh in 2026, which is equivalent to Japan’s national electricity consumption.

The report noted that effects of this explosion in demand will not be distributed evenly however, raising "significant concerns about regional grid stress and power capacity".

In the US, just 15 states are responsible for hosting 80% of the country’s data centers. In northern Virginia’s ‘Data Center Alley’, sites consume roughly 25% of the region’s electricity, which could rise to 50% in a high-growth scenario.

It's a similar story in Ireland, where data centers could consume up to 32% of the nation’s electricity by 2026, according to another IEA study, which would exceed the combined energy consumption of all urban homes in 2023.

AI expansion may be limited due to both human and natural constraints

The report’s authors, Rémi Paccou, director of the sustainability research institute at Schneider Electric, and Professor Fons Wijnhoven, associate professor at the University of Twente, sketched out four potential scenarios of AI electricity consumption over the next decade.

In all but one of these scenarios, Paccou and Wijnhoven warn of inequality in terms of the distribution of AI inferencing capabilities as well as energy challenges.

The first scenario is one in which AI-driven advancements in energy efficiency and resource optimization result in substantial improvements in data center operations.

“A symbiotic cycle emerges between AI and the new energy system, where AI enhances system efficiency through renewable supply, demand-side electrification, and grid management, which in turn powers more sustainable AI development,” the report describes.

The key findings of the analysis of this potential outcome were that generative AI inferencing will emerge as the dominant electricity consumer, but traditional AI will play a central role in decarbonization efforts.

Additionally, resource-conscious approaches to generative AI training will exhibit an intensified focus on using less energy-intensive models.

Scenario two describes a scenario where AI expansion is hindered by natural or encounter natural or human-linked constraints. These hindrances include power availability, data scarcity, material and mineral shortages, computational resources, as well as regulatory restrictions.

Paccou and Wijnhoven found that this scenario also implies potential regional disparities in their AI inferencing capabilities.

“Areas with more robust power infrastructure and cooler climates may have advantages in scaling their AI operations, potentially leading to geographical concentrations of AI inference capabilities.”

Uncoordinated AI governance could lead to localized energy crunches

The third scenario is one in which improvements in AI efficiency actually induce an increase in overall energy consumption as firms push for widescale AI implementation across all sectors.

The subsequent “unbounded growth” competes with natural constraints, and could exacerbate AI access inequality and e-waste issues by prioritizing performance over practicality.

Finally, the fourth scenario is labeled the ‘AI Energy Crisis’, in which rapid growth of AI leads to an "unforeseen energy crisis where the technology’s electricity demand begins to conflict with other critical sectors of the economy.”

“In this scenario, very high exogenous constraints are put on local grid capacities as the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of data center energy consumption might reach staggering levels, potentially surpassing 25% in some regions,” the report stated.

In this scenario, uncoordinated AI governance is projected to lead to disunified regulation and localized blackouts in high demand areas.

The report added that piling additional resources into new areas like synthetic data and multimodal learning will likely intensify local energy crunches associated with AI training.

“The geographical implications of these trends could lead to a concentration of AI development in areas with access to both vast amounts of data and energy, potentially exacerbating local energy challenges in these regions.”

Making net-zero goals directly relevant to each individual could be the most powerful tool for encouraging employees to take charge and help IT organizations and their industry reduce emissions faster.

That's according to Chia-Huei Wu, professor in management at King's Business School, King's College London, who explains that research suggests developing personally relevant narratives that individual employees directly relate to and understand – as opposed to simply providing explanations or facts. 

"This can be based on a kind of storytelling," he says.

It makes sense to have all hands on deck where possible – the task is huge, after all. 

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), average global temperatures must rise no more than 1.5°C (34.7°F) this century to avoid catastrophic climate change, which means slashing emissions 43% by 2030 versus 2019 levels and at least 60% by 2035. 

"The most important factor is motivation – it's about whether people want to do something, using their internal time," Wu says. "People may not think a fact (such as a figure from an emissions estimate) is relevant to them personally." 

A simple example might be developing a communication strategy that encourages employees to rethink sending emails, how much data they use, and the like. Even though these can be small things, the direct relevance to their own behaviors is more obvious than other initiatives, he points out.

Of course, organizations can help further by examining the potential for in-house mechanisms and initiatives that can foster greater efforts and provide routes to success, all of which should be embedded into daily work activities.

An example might be forming groups or "small clubs" that support each other to take action or suggest innovations or improvements. 

When employees can understand who is benefiting from an action or activity and why – understanding how everyone's work is connected across the whole organization – that can also increase the understanding of the meaning of their own work and how what they do can be influential, Wu points out.

"It sounds simple but has come out powerfully in organizational research" he says.

You might also consider that increasing focus on emissions can attract and develop more talent in the first instance, as Susan Kenniston, global sustainability head at Wipro, adds.

"Even knowing how to talk about it, even for recruiters and writing job descriptions and things, threading it into how you represent the company, it really starts there," she says.

Create a kind of "curriculum around sustainability that meets employees where they're at", she says.

Enabling education at executive and management levels that involves more junior employees can drive "faster feedback loops" on emissions over time, while rethinking metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in relation to the overall business value framework, she says.

Jillian Moore, sustainability and global advisory lead at Avanade, agrees, adding that leaders need to accept and be comfortable with the fact they no longer have all the answers, while also communicating better and more consistently.

"We have a lot of people on the ground out there with clients, usually at slightly earlier levels in their career, who are hugely passionate and know more about sustainability," she says. "Sometimes we can be holding them back, not giving them the runway or space to actually act."

Get with the program

While it can be difficult to get consensus across every individual in a company, people involved at whatever level can often agree on the direction of travel. Then the task can become more about ensuring everyone can play their part and deciding what each individual can contribute, she says.

"You … need a program that helps take on board all these ideas," says Moore. "And you need transparency of outcome with everybody."

For example, if you're reducing travel and you show how the associated cost savings benefit a role it can feel like a win-win, encouraging people to bring forward further ideas, Moore says.

She also advises that organizations make emissions reduction part of people's objectives and appraisals, knitted directly into the job description; sustainability as indivisible from personal career progression.

"We're still at a point where people are prepared to do a lot of this altruistically and some people are very passionate about it. But I don't know how long that phase will last," Moore says.

Rajkumar Vijayarangakannan, leader of network design and devops at ManageEngine, emphasizes education and awareness initiatives as critical to sustainable practice for increasingly power-hungry machines, woven in right from the data center construction phase.

"Our team runs the bigger energy consumption areas, the data centers [which account for] 60-70% of our energy consumption," he says.  "Even five years ago, it was different. We have to optimize every space; even the smallest optimization helps us save a lot." 

Vijayarangakannan says he typically starts by talking to employees about switching off the lights. That might sound simplistic but actually it demonstrates awareness that every little action makes a difference, and that can very much be down to individual choices. 

The effectiveness of actions can be easily showcased these days with the use of temperature sensors, for example, he adds.

"Everything is involved with carbon emissions. So we started giving awareness programmes on which operations, methods and practices can give much better carbon emission control," Vijayarangakannan says. "Then they can, as employees, all be aware of it and then do their own individual things. Each and every one is part of a green program, and it starts from the level one employee."

In one small data center project, the vacuuming was consuming a lot of power; noticing this, the organization changed the method of cleaning, resulting in much lower ongoing emissions. "Every aspect of it is our individual responsibility," Vijayarangakannan says.

Every little helps

Sheryl Moore, head of sustainability at Stone Group, similarly favors getting buy-in from everyone to fully embed sustainability.

"Many people help me with this," she says. "A lot of it comes down to the values and the culture of the organization. If you encourage a more open conversation, that really helps."

People have to feel safe to voice their opinions and see that ideas also do get implemented, without necessarily needing to fully define, curate or present that idea in full themselves, Moore notes.

As James Robey, global head of environmental sustainability at Capgemini, says, tackling the climate crisis relies on collective action. 

"It’s vital for employees to be fully engaged," Robey says. "Our most far-reaching ... was a VP-led initiative to boost employees’ understanding of sustainability, while sparking new ideas and learnings for climate action."

I don’t like cryptocurrencies, so it’s safe to say watching not just Bitcoin but a large bucket of other cryptocurrencies sustain a $9 billion crash in the late summer of 2022 ignited a frisson of schadenfreude. The implosion, part of the ongoing crypto winter, might have even forced formerly optimistic traders into wondering if this was the beginning of the end.

After a few minutes of prodding and poking at the less hysterical regions of the net, I had some actual answers. Perhaps the most useful is that the entire market – all cryptocurrencies added together – is broadly agreed to be around $1 trillion. That means the overall loss in that particular crash, which sounds impressive at $9 billion, is still less than 1% of its valuation. Most currencies go through shifts in valuation like this without all the accompanying brouhaha that seems to attend the world of crypto.

All the while, many people forget that all cryptocurrencies depend on a great deal of computing power, both to be mined and to be maintained from day to day. This is a colossal amount, in fact. We’ve all heard the anecdotes as Bitcoin has surpassed the electricity consumption of Holland or Argentina.

Now, the rules are changing as quickly as energy prices are rising. This is bound to have a continued impact on the rarefied world of the blockchain and crypto, which may be strange new entities to the world of finance, but which suck up the kilowatts just like any businesses old or new.

This brings me to a rule learnt as an old banker into the technological world, which is the value placed upon rarity. If you could just buy all the bitcoins you wanted, then the price would go up until sellers are motivated to release their holdings. So why does it seem that cryptocurrencies have to keep on being “minted”, at a time when their competition for our megawatts is, to say the least, unwelcome, verging on foolish? Wouldn’t a moratorium on cryptocurrency farming while we have an energy sector problem, make existing Bitcoin and other crypto holdings more valuable, not less?

In a final irony, the strongest proof of the laws of economics as applied to rarity comes from the gold trade. Worldwide prices of gold are set every day in London, for everybody. This includes the Russians, who have enough gold in the ground to make it cheaper than brass, should they choose to get digging. If they understand the nature of rarity, then how come our crypto pioneers don’t, or want to see that rule overthrown, deposed, ignored?

This was exactly my thinking when I then read that Ethereum has essentially done exactly that. And not only has it placed a hold on minting new currency, but also hugely reduced the ongoing energy demands by switching to a new proof-of-stake concept that avoids the energy bill previously associated with any proof-of-work transaction.

So, good for Ethereum. But I cannot see any rationale, as we venture yet further into this energy crisis, for allowing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency farms to keep running.

Companies in the tech industry have contracted more renewable energy across 2022 than any other sector in a year that saw record investment in clean power, according to a new report.

326 companies invested in 77 gigawatts (GW) of domestic clean energy throughout the year, enough to power more than one thousand data centres and worth more than $55 billion (£44.6 billion) in capital investment.

The tech sector alone accounted for 48% of all wind and solar power totalling 36.8 GW, with the energy industry coming in second at just 6.7 GW, according to the American Clean Power Association's figures.

Tech giants Amazon, Meta, and Google have contracted the most of all companies in the sector. By the end of 2022, the companies had contracted 12.4 GW, 8.7 GW, and 6.2 GW respectively.

Over half of the contracted power is not yet operational. But 36 GW, equivalent to 16% of all renewable power operating in the US, now stems from corporate funding as companies look to decrease carbon impact across their supply chains and invest in renewables for long-term stability.

Large tech firms have typically chosen to invest in clean power contracts close to locations of important operations such as offices, warehouses or data centres.

Those with more operations centres have invested in more geographically-diverse projects, with only Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Walmart having started projects in ten or more states.

Meta’s contracted projects, for example, have been built in close proximity to its regional data centres which make up much of the company’s annual energy demand. Each Meta clean power project across 22 states operates on the same grid as a Meta data centre, apart from its planned centre in Kuna, Idaho.

The location of clean power projects is largely influenced by power purchase agreements (PPAs) - the most popular mechanism used by companies to purchase renewable energy.

These see a company agree to purchase energy from a generator that owns and operates a project at a set price, rather than a utility company. Companies obtain renewable energy credits which add to their sustainability records.

Texas, for example, accounts for 35% of all corporate clean energy contracts partly because the state is well-situated for both solar and wind power, but also because of relatively cheap PPAs with The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

Green energy keeps data centres affordable

Analysts say that businesses are increasingly betting on sustainability to tackle disruption, and contracting power generation is key to this long-term investment.

In 2022, Gartner warned that the energy crisis will hit data centre budgets by 40% or more. Tiny Haynes, senior research director at Gartner, told the IT Pro Podcast that prices could remain volatile for years.

Renewable energy is cheaper to generate than it has ever been thanks to investment in wind and solar technology, and is already being embraced by companies seeking to slash their energy bills.

Firms are more aware of the cost of sticking with fossil fuels than ever, especially after the scare of rising fossil fuel prices driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Corporate investment has turned to solar over wind power, as firms look to shore up utility-scale energy security with 14.4 GW of procurement in 2022. 58% (45 GW) of corporate contracted renewable energy is in solar, though only 28% of this is currently in operation.

Amazon has an official target of running on 100% renewable energy by 2030, though claims it is set to reach this goal by 2025. Google has committed to operations on “24/7 carbon-free energy” by 2030, while Meta targets [PDF] net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its "value chain" by 2030.

The majority (86%) of business leaders plan to increase their organisation's investment in sustainability initiatives as a way to protect against disruption, according to new research.

Most leaders (87%) whose companies are already engaged in sustainability initiatives expect to expand these in 2023 and 2024, linking the investments made so far to improvements in company operations, as well as to supply chain savings.

Respondents identified that a number of costs related to operations can be mitigated through sustainability investments, with energy consumption named by 65% of those surveyed, and business travel by 42%. Other costs that were mentioned include customer transactions (40%) and productivity (33%).

83% of respondents also said that such investments have created value in both the short and long term for their organisation, with costs outweighed by immediate efficiency improvements and the promise of a more stable future for their company.

“Sustainability enables businesses to cope with disruption,” said Kristin Moyer, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

“Economic uncertainty, geopolitical conflict and escalating materials and energy costs are forcing businesses to re-examine all forms of expenditure. This focus on essentialism, in combination with increasing stakeholder desire to see progress on environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, creates new opportunities for organisations to grow while mitigating cost and risk.”

With firms facing rising energy bills driven in large part by the invasion of Ukraine, further Gartner research has predicted that data centre costs could increase by 40% in the immediate future.

Investment in software sustainability, as well as more efficient hardware, will be critical in handling these costs, while simultaneously reducing energy impact that will worsen the climate crisis, the analyst house concluded.

The survey was conducted by Gartner across the APAC, North American, and European regions in June and July 2022, reaching 221 respondents in executive roles at companies with annual revenue of $250 million or more.

Although a range of financial benefits stemmed from sustainability programmes, the report also made clear that business leaders see customers as the primary driving force behind greater investment in this area. Customers were identified as the group building pressure behind sustainability by the majority of respondents (80%), compared to investors (60%), and regulators (55%).

57% positively linked enterprise-wide sustainability programmes with their income results, although only 42% indicated that they are currently using said programmes to drive innovation or growth. However, with the trend of greater investment illustrated in the results of the survey, it is clear that sustainability is seen as a rewarding opportunity.

“On one hand, the returns on investments in sustainability remain unclear in the short term as people experiment and venture - there will be winners and losers,” said Joseph Tabita, SVP of energy and commodities lead at digital transformation consultancy Publicis Sapient.

“On the other hand, it will be the biggest long-term return ever seen when we think about future generations and future relevance of today’s businesses. Reasons to invest are plentiful - providing new revenue streams, accelerating innovation, new forms of customer engagement and providing a glide path away from business models that will be less relevant in the future - for example, Big Oil companies transforming into Energy companies, or countries like Saudi Arabia retooling for a post-fossil fuel world.

“The voice of the customer is a powerful incentive to companies to change, but we also need more pressure and regulation from governments and investors to make sustainable business decisions. The takeaway of the last few COPs is that more is still needed from all participants to accelerate this transformation.”

Because the survey only contacted companies which are currently engaged in sustainability programmes, the results may not be representative of industry-wide investment trends. No statistics are provided, for example, on the number of companies not currently invested in sustainability but who plan to in the coming years.

It follows on from a similar survey conducted by Gartner, which revealed that sustainability is the key strategic technology trend for 2023, as identified by investors. Environmental, social, and governance (ESF) expectations continue to push companies to spend on sustainability schemes, and government regulations in the public sphere have been joined by the growing availability of sustainable technology in the private sphere to ease the transition for companies.

Green growth is seen as a key area of potential among IT decision-makers, and beyond cost savings sustainable technology can be leveraged to improve services for businesses and customers like, across the sector.

With the UK in the midst of an energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine, businesses face the real prospect of winter blackouts.

It isn’t just the struggle to keep energy bills down that businesses should be concerned with. As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, the National Grid recently warned households could face three-hour outages if demand for power outstrips supply.

While the government insists it will do all it can to keep the lights on, it has reportedly war-gamed what emergency measures might be needed during seven-day power cuts. It has also held talks with data centre operators.

No firm decisions have been made to date, but CEOs, the c suite, and IT departments are being urged to establish how they would ensure business continuity and employee wellbeing if the lights go out.

Prepare for the worst

Companies must immediately check disaster recovery (DR) plans, advises Mark Molyneux, EMEA CTO for IT firm Cohesity. This should be a priority, especially for those dependent on a data centre.

“Operational resiliency has a key part to play when looking at power outages,” he says. “Many companies will have solid DR plans for their data centres, but these cater for major outage scenarios. Random blackouts over a prolonged period offer a very different requirement for operational resiliency, and to the planned approach to cater for such events.

“Organisations might decide to move copies of their critical data to an alternative location to create more resiliency against potential blackouts.”

Molyneux also warns of other risks including cyber criminals exploiting confusion when the power goes out, as staff will be preoccupied. This needs a fresh approach to both cyber security and physical security, including checking daily logs, while also building an updated map of digital assets and the interdependencies between computing and storage and the delivery of a service.

“The IT and leadership teams in an organisation should share the same understanding of the potential risk of downtime. Both should also have the same understanding of the level of maturity their organisation has with their visibility of data,” he adds. “This will enable them to better understand the potential risk of downtime and data loss. The organisation should run regular drills and simulations as tabletop exercises.”

The remote worker problem

Today’s power issues stem from the UK’s dependency on burning gas – which is in shorter supply – to create electricity. Given the unprecedented nature of the events that caused this crisis, many businesses may have previously marked blackouts as “low risk” or even seen the prospect fall off their continuity plans altogether, laments Robert Rutherford, CEO at IT consultancy QuoStar.

“Not having plans for likely events is extremely negligent; if issues occur and a board hasn't been in control of its risks then regulatory bodies are going to be extremely unhappy,” he warns.

Rutherford adds that given remote working is now the norm, plans must include what to do when home workers lose power. This includes outlining who they let know and where they then go. In offices, processes must factor in how home workers interact with systems based on-premise, such as phone services, and the effect on simple actions like access to buildings from digital entry systems.

“Due to the pandemic, many businesses have changed their working completely,” he adds. “Many need to ensure they have the office space to accommodate staff in a disaster power outage scenario. It's no good thinking staff can just go to a coffee shop or to a hotel – chances are they will be full, or also without power if local.

“Larger businesses should already have diverse power feeds, from different grids. If they don’t then they may want to look at those options. In the past, this would have been extremely common, along with large battery backup – uninterrupted power supply – and generators. Some larger businesses may need to revisit the cost versus the impact of this.”

Additionally, Rutherford advises caution with electronics, as switching power on and off can blow devices such as switches, routers, servers, storage devices, and firewalls. All those must be on UPS to protect against spikes, he explains, adding: “With that in mind, it's important to ensure all UPS devices have current warranties and have been load tested to ensure they have enough run time to shut down equipment gracefully.”

Employee safety and legal redress

It’s not just IT uptime that companies need to prepare for. Decisions such as adjusting working hours to accommodate the power cuts may go against employee contracts, explains employment law associate at Paris Smith, Charlotte Farrell. This risks discrimination claims by those with childcare responsibilities or disabilities who may find it harder to adapt.

Farrell adds imposing short-term working – sending employees home early because of power cuts – without the contractual right could also give rise to claims for unlawful deduction from wages or constructive unfair dismissal.

“It is vital to carry out risk assessments to ensure a safe working environment," she advises. "Employees who reasonably believe they are in serious and imminent danger due to a dangerous workplace can legally refuse to work and are protected against dismissal without needing the usual two-year qualifying service for unfair dismissal claims.

“It is likely that requiring employees to work as normal without electricity could trigger this right for some employees and workers, particularly those in factories or where sudden stoppages of equipment could be dangerous. Employers should not penalise employees for any performance issues caused by the blackouts.”

Gavin Scarr Hall, Peninsula’s director of health and safety, raises further practical issues that must be considered, such as the carbon monoxide (CO) arising from generators. He says CO detectors must be working in a building, with generators and fuel kept outdoors and at least 20 feet away from windows and doors.

“Slips and trips are a major hazard in low light, as it gets harder to see obstructions and obstacles,” he continues. “Keep pedestrian routes clear and check your emergency lighting regularly for faults. If your workplace doesn’t have much natural light or your staff work outside of daylight hours, provide torches and battery-powered lamps for extra light.”

Scarr Hall also points to health hazards businesses might overlook. These include checking water is safe for employees to drink, ensuring the right temperature of fridges during and after blackouts, and throwing out any food that may have been exposed to unsafe temperatures.

"Make sure you involve your employees when planning for power outages," he adds. "Knowing an employer is prepared will help avoid any unnecessary panic or distress.”

With only a short window of time left to ensure resiliency, however, Ian Wood, UKI CTO at Veritas, cautions there’ll be little to no excuse for organisations that don’t make reasonable efforts to prepare. “The potential for power cuts have been widely publicised so, if they come, no one will be able to say that it’s a surprise,” he says. “Customers are unlikely to forgive a lack of preparation.”

Anxieties are rife given the surge in the cost of energy, with a combination of global factors and lack of long-term planning domestically causing prices to skyrocket as we edge into the winter months.

Everyone, from consumers to businesses of all sizes, are looking for ways to reduce their energy bills and cut consumption. Employees, for example, are asking whether going into the office might save on energy bills, while organisations wonder whether the support scheme available cuts the mustard. Indeed, an entire generation raised on the mantra of “disruption” is now finding out just what that term means when applied to their own energy costs.

It seems likely the present price squeeze will ease off at some point in the future, but it's inevitable the situation will get worse before it gets better. The long-term solution might be to power down any energy-hungry systems for good, in favour of cloud services and mass-scale remote working. Those are, however, major projects, so we must ask ourselves where our electricity is going in the first place, and how we can begin working to get our bills down bit by bit. We examine some of the most common causes of excess power use, and what you can do at the corporate level to reduce your consumption, your carbon footprint and, ultimately, your energy bill.

1. Measure energy consumption

You could use a little plug-socket wattmeter, but that’s not ideal for IT infrastructure, as it requires you to unplug each device you want to test. The professionals use a clamp metre, which clips onto the power cable of a running system and measures the strength of the magnetic field around it, which in turn indicates how much power is being consumed.

You can get one of these clever devices for under £200, so depending on what it discovers it could pay for itself pretty quickly. This is the first step towards understanding how one can reduce energy consumption. Although not everything can simply be ‘turned off’ – for example, powering down a high-wattage server – it’s a crucial first step in a broader plan.

There are also various tools you can use to give you an estimate for how much you're likely to save by taking various measures. Chcek out Schneider Electric's virtualisation calculator, which allows you to input variables to determine the energy cost breakdown. Another illuminating tool is Microsoft's cloud carbon tracking dashboard.

As far as day-to-day hardware goes, it might be a good idea to double-check how much power is being consumed, especially if fans are constantly spinning, or a power metre indicates unexpectedly high power draw. There is, thankfully, a handy tool built directly into the Windows operating system (OS) that can help to diagnose the cause.

Open an elevated Command Prompt (right-click on the icon and select 'Run as Administrator'), and enter "powercfg -energy" without the quotation marks. Windows will spend about 60 seconds analysing the PC's configuration and detecting anything anomalous about its power consumption. When it's finished, enter "energy-report.html" to open the results in your default browser.

The report is split into three sections: information (useful to know but safe to ignore), warnings and errors. Errors on our test machine included unusually high processor usage of 35.95% when the system was running nothing apart from background tasks. That will have a significant effect on our overall energy consumption. Using this as a starting point, we were able to use Task Manager to try disabling various processes and services to identify the culprit and take remedial action.

2. Optimise energy-guzzling IT infrastructure

Most of the things in any organisation’s server room are probably running 24/7 because that organisation needs them to be. An audit, however, often reveals that a few systems are consuming the lion’s share of energy – and probably not the ones you’d expect. Some machines draw a lot of power because they need to keep those RAID disks spinning and cooled; others do so because their vents and heat sinks are clogged up with dust, resulting in the fans running at full speed all the time.

It might be that the best way to manage your energy budget is to dip into your hardware budget. If you look at the power consumption of a ten-year-old file server and then compare a modern counterpart based on something such as an AMD Ryzen CPU, the difference almost defies belief. Not that power-efficiency is the only benefit; the cost of the newer hardware can also be justified in terms of improved performance and support.

Improving server efficiency is another step towards getting energy bills down, but can often be problematic. The hardware needs to be powerful, by definition, and, unlike hardware like PCs and laptops, it spends barely any time sitting idle. What's more, you can't generally power down a server out of hours.

A 2011 IBM white paper put the upper-end consumption of 1U, 2U and 4U rackmount servers at 350W, 400W and 1kW respectively, with a fully populated blade server chassis typically consuming 4.5kW. Those figures are upper estimates, and improvements in server technology over the past decade have brought power demands right down. Even so, if you're looking to reduce your energy footprint, it's clear that the server room deserves particular attention.

One way you can make savings is by maximising use of virtualisation. If you virtualise multiple discrete environments on a 1U device, suddenly it can do the work of ten separate servers split between different departments. Smaller organisations can take advantage of the same principle without even needing to own their servers, by renting space and processor cycles on commercial shared hosting.

Buying a set of modern services with a blade-chassis architecture means you’ll be drawing in all the power supply data you could ever wish for, along with extensive details of every other aspect of performance. That’s no small investment, though. In most fully instrumented builds like this, the cost of the licensing along with the monitoring software is likely to outweigh the money you’re trying to save on power. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’re left with a lot of small LAN and single-PC utilities; these tend to be produced by frustrated third parties and susceptible to the pitfalls of hobbyist code.

3. Replace older PCs and optimise laptops

It’s worth testing hardware that employees use on a day-to-day basis, and also working on a programme to replace these too, if need-be. Desktop PCs, even excluding their standalone monitors, consumer far more energy than laptops, so if you can move desk-based staff onto mobile or ultraportable devices, you can make a saving. Naturally, there's no point doing this outside of your regular upgrade cycle, as the energy savings will be dwarfed by the residual value lost through upgrading early.

If you must use desktop displays, smaller screens with a less intense backlight can make a difference. You only need put your hand on the back of some large panel displays to recognise how much energy is being wasted as heat. While they can act as surrogate heaters in colder months, in summer they will add to your air conditioning bill.

Then, there's the question of how much time your PCs spend in full-power mode. A typical PC and monitor combination could consume around 200W when sitting idle so if a system's left switched on 24/7, that's a cost to your business of hundreds of pounds a year. Often, employees simply leave them switched on. If you can enforce a staff switch-off policy (or automate the process) to ensure that your desktops are only awake for eight hours a day, you could reclaim over £200 per seat.

Each laptop, meanwhile, might only consume a fraction of the power of a server, but there are probably more of them plugged in at any one time. Although a laptop-first approach has a great impact on reducing energy consumption, they can still be quite wasteful if their usage isn't optimised. High-end hardware, for instance, is often dished out as a mark of seniority, but someone who spends long business hours dealing with emails and spreadsheets has no need for a workstation-class processor.

Then there’s the bloatware factor. Users love to fill up their laptops with things like 3D games, along with plenty of other stuff that they don’t even realise is there. The laptops with the highest power draw could even be infected with cryptocurrency-mining Trojans, meaning you can slash power consumption with a simple bit of malware clean-up.

4. Adjust Windows 11 power settings

If your office mostly runs on desktop PCs, you might not have spared much thought for Windows' built-in energy management tools. There are some powerful options here, though, which can make a real difference to your power consumption, and it might be worth advising, or even enforcing, employees to enable these settings while at work.

To access them, open the Control Panel, click through 'Hardware and Sound' to 'Power Options', then click the 'Edit Plan Settings' link beside your current plan, followed by 'Change advanced power settings'. This is where you'll find the Power Options dialogue box, which gives you more control than just picking 'Balanced', 'High Performance' or 'Power Saver'.

If you're working on a mobile device, though, you will find settings for both 'On battery' and 'Plugged in'; the former option is aimed at minimising power consumption, while the latter is skewed towards achieving the best performance.

Keep track of things such as display brightness, as super-bright screens can devour power at a shocking rate. If adaptive brightness is an option, it makes sense to use this to automatically dim the display when possible. Consider setting video playback quality to power-saving too, to reduce GPU power consumption.

If you're managing a network of Windows clients, you can push one of the three default power plans to all systems using Group Policy Editor. You'll find the setting inside the System\Power Management sub-section of the Editor's Administrative Templates. Sub-sections also give you access to sleep, display and hard disk settings, all of which can have an effect on the amount of energy a remote PC consumes.

5. Enforce the use of power-efficient apps

Software developers don't generally pay a lot of attention to power-efficiency, but if you notice fans regularly spinning up when using one particular application, that's a clue that it's using more juice than it should. Consider switching to an alternative if you can. Notably, there is one group of developers who are happy to talk about how much power their software consumes, and that's those working on browsers. It makes sense, as Microsoft calculates that Windows users spend more than half of their time on the web, so improving browser efficiency can make a big difference to power costs.

How is this done? Writing on the Chromium Blog in March 2017, Google's Alexander Timin explained that activity in background tabs accounts for a third of Chrome's power demands on the desktop which is why Chromium limits background tabs to 1% of a single CPU core. Not only does this keep your CPU free to work on other things, it means less energy is wasted on web pages you're not looking at.

Microsoft's Brandon Heenan, meanwhile, responded on the Windows Blog, claiming that the Edge browser used up to 31% less power than Chrome, and up to 44% less than Firefox. Microsoft also claims that using HTML5 in preference to Flash has a positive effect on consumption.

Taking an application's power requirements into account at the point of deployment can deliver deep savings when multiplied across the client systems in a small or medium-sized business (SMB). Limiting user accounts so that individual staff members can't deviate from officially sanctioned choices can lock these savings in for the future.

6. Invest in green technology

Aside from consuming less energy, another way to cut power bills is by reducing your reliance on the national grid by installing your own solar panels.

Needless to say, solar energy has its limits, especially in the UK. If you’re dealing with a cupboard full of dusty towers that look like they fell out of the 1980s then even the odd record heatwave is unlikely to provide enough energy to keep everything up and running.

A decent solar array, however, can generate a persistent feed of 2kW – enough to drive a good few NAS or gateway appliances. Or you can feed the energy you collect back into the grid to offset your bills.

This isn’t futurology. Solar panelling for industrial buildings and offices is a mature technology, and already underpins a number of major infrastructures that might otherwise be held back by power provision. Take Vodafone, for example: in the past, the company’s biggest business cost in the UK was the power required to run its 3G network. By sharp contrast, the 5G network is planned to power itself entirely by solar panels. There’s no reason why your business can’t enjoy similar benefits.

With additional reporting from Nik Rawlinson

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘How the energy crisis will impact data centres’. We apologise for any errors.

Adam Shepherd

Hi, I'm Adam Shepherd.

Zach Marzouk

And I'm Zach Marzouk,

Adam

and this is the IT Pro Podcast where today, we're taking a look at the current energy crisis.

Zach Marzouk

The UK is currently facing a serious power problem. A number of factors including the war in Ukraine, low gas storage levels and unusually high demand, have caused wholesale energy prices to skyrocket, and those prices are being passed on to consumers. With price caps on domestic energy bills rising at an alarming rate, many households are facing the prospect of their bills doubling within six months.

Adam

Domestic users aren't the only people who need power however, and while consumer energy bills are rising at an alarming rate, the situation may prove to be even more dire for the IT industry. Data centre operators in particular require enormous amounts of power in order to continue providing vital services, both to consumers and to other businesses, and rising costs could prove catastrophic for the continuity of the services. Joining us to talk about the potential risks posed by the current crisis, as well as how businesses can mitigate the potential impact of rising energy costs is Tiny Haynes, Senior Director of Research at Gartner. Tiny, thanks for being here.

Tiny Haynes

Thank you very much for having me.

Adam

So Tiny, the situation in terms of energy costs is not great at the moment, I think it's fair to say. But what role do energy costs typically play in the budgets of datacenter operators?

Tiny

Well, there's a number of different answers to that. For small colocation services, where energy costs are actually bundled into the price, then, obviously, the provider, the data centre operator is going to take the hit. And it's up to them to try to secure supplies for as long as possible. In fact, I was speaking to a customer this morning, and one of these providers has got a deal for the next four years at a set rate. So some of these guys are hedging and going quite well. The other side of things are going to be for those data centre operators who just simply pass through the energy costs. And of course, then that responsibility sits on the customer themselves. And it's used for bigger deals around about 500 kilowatts outputs, where you'll see a straightforward pass through, although there's always variants of that lower figure. So for a datacenter operator that's taking the risk, and if they do not have a capability of passing through the price rises, and normally contracts will have maybe a three or 5% annual inflation adjusted price rise, then they are going to certainly suffer in the short term. And if indeed if if these energy prices don't seem to be coming down over the next few years, then I think there's going to be a lot more distressed assets in this market.

Zach

Do you happen to know how much these costs are expected to rise over the next six to 12 months?

Tiny

Well, that's the big question, isn't it? So at the moment, I'm hearing people talk between 25 and 50%. It really depends on the global gas price. And we're now at the mercy of the geopolitics. Unfortunately, it will take some time for the UK as a general rule to bring in additional capacity from renewable sources where you're not going to be subject to such price variance. Interesting enough that we've had the announcement by the outgoing Prime Minister of new investment into nuclear power stations in in Sizewell C. But that's probably gonna be about 10 years before it comes online. So as far as price rises, go, I can only see them going up. I would not be surprised if they are looking to double in the same way that the consumer prices are doubling. In fact, I've seen non datacenter operators but other organisations seeing their prices go up by a factor of three, which possibly could happen in the datacenter market over the next six to 12 months.

Adam

Oof. That is big, big numbers that we're talking about then if it's a doubling of power costs. So for those data centre operators that on passing the power costs directly on to their customers, and charge a flat rate, all inclusive; what kind of margins do they have, generally speaking, to absorb these increases?

Tiny

it really depends on the datacenter. And the operator themselves. If I am providing straightforward data centre space, then obviously, the margin is going to be very exposed to the power pricing. And I would carry between a 15 to 40% margin on that service. However, if I'm providing managed services, so, putting in like cloud like services, or maybe professional services, there's more margin to play with. So a straightforward colocation provider who's in the retail space, so sub-100 kilowatts, and if they're just not doing any pass through, and there's no language in their contract, which allows them to make emergency payments, I think that there's going to be a lot of problems for them going forward. But if you're offering more managed services, which might be application management, and monitoring, maybe professional services on top, there's a bit more margin to play with and the data centre costs become less of a factor. And indeed, we're seeing that with the cloud guys. So Amazon, Microsoft and Google, what they're doing is they're not passing on the price rises in energy costs currently to the consumer. And when you ask them directly, they say no, there's no intention, will that change in the next six to 12 months, if we see a huge increase in pricing? Some of these providers are making a lot of money, a lot of margin, and some of them are not. So I think you're probably looking at so those organisations which aren't making as much margin who'd be more likely to pass on the price raises. But then you get into a whole different sort of conversation about which cloud provider do I go with? Are they going to be a going concern going forward?

Zach

Could this be an opportunity for the bigger cloud providers to snap up the smaller ones if they can withstand the costs?

Tiny

The problem with the cloud providers, if it's, let's take the example the hyperscalers, like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, they've built all of their infrastructure and services based on their own code. And the reason that they're able to innovate so quickly is because of the fact that they have open API's, everything's built to a certain style. And it's easy for them to continue to grow. If I start to buy cloud providers who use different source code, I'm gonna have to really re-engineer that code to work in my environment, and do I necessarily want to get involved in a market, which has been a bit more distressed when I'm having problems myself? Now saying that, you will find that Ireland has currently got a moratorium on new data centre build, because they just can't provide the power required for these DCs. I mean, some of these DCS, you're talking tens of megawatts of power requirements. So it might be worth some of these guys to say, Okay, what we'll do is we'll buy your datacenter for our own services, but we'll just trash all your systems and services, because we won't making any money out of that, or it might cost us too much to go and reengineer it for our own platform.

Adam

So speaking of trashing services, is there any capacity, as it were, for data centre operators to effectively try and mitigate their energy bills, by just saying, Okay, we're going to just switch off a bunch of racks and just radically limit the kind of headroom that we have on our services and on our datacenter and accept a bit of loss of kind of compute scale, in exchange for limiting the risk of kind of price spikes.

Tiny

If you're a straightforward data centre provider where you're offering space and power, there's gonna be limited scope for you to switch things off unless you get rid of the customers. Now we did see that happening with TelecityRedbus when they decided to go and do their amalgamation and we saw these half rack and quarter rack services being ejected by the new entity. So you effectively get rid of some customers because they are too small, they're not going to be giving enough margin, but if you're fundamentally just providing space and power, your hands are pretty tied. But if you say look, yeah, I can offer additional managed services and make more money then there's that conversation to be had to say, Okay, well, let's eat into that margin. I mean, a customer's going to be aware of the exposure that these colocation providers have today. We saw this year Sungard go into administration, that was part of that, not necessarily the only reason, but part of that was going to be because of the power price lock in. And with the power prices going up dramatically, and customers who are resigning with other data centre providers are getting a bit of a bill shock, because suddenly their power price had gone through the roof.

Adam

On that subject, then, who would you say is in a better position - If anyone - customers who are running their own kind of on premise infrastructure and running their own services off that, or downstream customers of cloud service providers and public cloud providers? Is there anyone that's kind of more insulated from these increases?

Tiny

I think the energy price is going to hit on premise data centres as much as it's going to hit colocation. Will your facilities guys have done the same sort of negotiation that the data centre's guys would have done? Would they have had the same sort of ability to negotiate megawatts of power? Probably not. So you're probably a lot more exposed. For the cloud guys. Currently, they are not passing on that price. So once again, we see that the attraction of cloud over on premises. Yeah, so I think that the only other thing is, is get away from the fossil fuels and go to Norway or Iceland, where the data centres are using renewable energy; 97% In Norway and 100% in Iceland, you don't get the same sort of bill shock.

Zach

How much of a potential problem is this for Europe, compared to the UK?

Tiny

Europe, the problem is doubled. Because you don't just have the issue with energy prices going up. And I'm thinking places like Germany, you also have the problem of actual energy availability. Speaking to some customers in Germany, they are predicting there will be blackouts. And therefore, yes, a datacenter should have UPS and generator and an on site diesel. But if you knock out an entire city, so for example, Frankfort, where it's one of the big data centre locations, power fails there for any certain amount of time, everyone's going to want to resupply their diesel at the same point. I mean, you've got lots of data centres there will be exposed. So I think that the European problem is even more than the UK. Not to say that we should be smug in any way, because obviously, because we do rely on Norwegian gas, if Norway as part of the EU, decides to prioritise the EU through some sort of agreement, then of course, what you'll then have is the UK losing out on gas and of course the pricing goes up even further. So I don't think anyone's really sitting pretty but I think the Europeans have actually a supply issue as well as a pricing issue.

Adam

So Microsoft's Project Natick, Natick, not entirely sure how you pronounce it, is its experiment to see if you can put datacenters essentially at the bottom of the sea. Is this something that's going to be a feasible possibility for leveraging kind of renewables and hydro and solar and wind and stuff like that, to kind of circumvent some of this reliance on fossil fuel based power?

Tiny

I always thought that project has actually been more for cooling. And you, it's not unprecedented. We do have data centres in Norway, which are taking water from the fjords and using that as a cooling source, hermetically sealing data centres and dropping them in the water. You can then plug in however you wish. But of course, you've got, there's a new data centre, you might be able to use some of the hydro electrical capability, which I mean, as I say, Orbital Marina are producing a one megawatts tidal system. You also have got a lot of offshore wind farms, which you could take a connection to, but it's not really a give you much more than a datacenter which says okay, I'm going to do a deal with Orbital or one of the wind farms. It's just the cooling is going to be a bit more efficient. Okay, you've reduced the PUE of the data centre and you might get some efficiencies in that. And, of course, you don't have to worry too much about the overheating that we've had recently with with the Google and other data centres. So there are elements that yes, that can certainly help. But I don't, don't think it's me that the absolute lifesaver, because you've got these huge, great big data centre requirements, we're talking megawatts of requirements here, and hermetically sealing them and put them into water is for certain use cases, maybe, but it's not going to solve all the problems. And how do you swap out a disk when a server goes down?

Adam

Yeah, that's, that's always the challenge. You can't exactly send a frogman down with a bag of bag of fresh drives.

Tiny

Exactly. Yeah.

Zach

What does the outlook look like for downstream cloud service providers and end user customers?

Tiny

As I say, the cloud guys aren't passing on the cost at the moment. So the customers shouldn't be affected - at the moment. And I keep on putting that proviso in because everything is unprecedented. We are in a situation where the short term answer is going to be they're swallowing the costs. But if over time, if you're not as a profitable cloud service, as maybe some of the real big guys are, then you're gonna start eating into your margin. And if it becomes to, how do I get some money to bail me out private equity might not necessarily want to jump in and save you if you're a distressed asset. So for the hyperscalers - well, definitely Amazon, Microsoft. I mean, Google, that that's always the question mark. But those two, I don't see much problems. Too many problems. Google is, it's an interesting organisation, that they're doing some very interesting things with GCP. They've got some really good deals out there and some good work they've done with distributed cloud. Do they continue running the GCP operations? Because we have seen them as they scale back on IoT. Will they start to scale back other services, just to focus on core, is is the question really to ask. And as this gets further and further along, and more pressure on margin, then I think people's hands will be played for them.

Adam

So we've spoken a lot about the the hyperscalers, and the sort of cushioning that they have to some degree from this. What about cloud service providers that are running their services on top of datacenter and hosting partners that maybe aren't as large as the hyperscalers, don't necessarily have as much insulation against those price increases? If their providers are passing the costs along to them, do those kind of downstream service providers then pass the costs on to their actual end user customers? Or are they also going to have to eat a portion of that cost for themselves?

Tiny

I think a mix of both, they'll try and resist it as much as possible. Because is this going to be a blip in the marketplace? With the new prime minister coming onboard, is there going to be rate relief for small, medium sized businesses, which might allow them to be a bit more flexible? So there's a lot of question marks here. So they might say in the short term, we'll swallow some of this margin because we know that longer term things are gonna get better? Or do they say, Look, we don't think that things are gonna get better, we're gonna have to pass on price increases to our customers. And the advantage, obviously, with a cloud contract is, is there's no commitment from either side. And so if your prices go up, you pay that price immediately.

Adam

And that, I think, combined with the kind of rising energy bills for businesses across the board, you know, outside of the kind of datacenter related costs, that could potentially be quite worrying for a lot of smaller businesses, as well, I think if they've got not just their own energy bills increasing but also the cloud costs that they're paying, increasing off the back of those energy price rises.

Tiny

Yeah. I certainly think that we do have a particularly nasty next few months until we see some resolution here, and yeah, if I was a small business, I would be certainly be very concerned about the exposure either my datacenter provider or my cloud provider has. So things like disaster recovery as a service where, unless you go into the major cloud providers, there's all sorts of niche solutions. If there's very niche solutions for verticals, I'd be quite concerned unless these guys are hosting with the big hyperscalers.

Zach

Are there any policies you would like to see introduced to help data centres?

Tiny

Well, I think that business rate relief is always going to be a handy one. The ability to get more stability in the energy prices, so negotiating contracts, longer term contracts with the energy providers to allow them to be a bit more stable. There's also going to be some opportunities to reengineer datacenters. We all talked about that this PUE rating, the power utilisation efficiency or effectiveness. But if you've got an older DC, it's going to be about 1.8, 1.6. The newer DCS come a lot lower. So there might be some government grants to be able to retrofit existing DCs for things like free air cooling, that might be useful. But it's going to take some capital and you know, getting access to that capital, you either get it from the private equity market or you get it from the government. The good news is that that private equity has been investing a lot in datacenter providers. So Black Rock have taken a big interest in QTS, DRT is just one big real estate fund. And I've seen EMAR do exactly the same in the Middle East that they're investing in data centres. So there's interest there. But I think if the government can obviously give out some sort of short term relief in this current climate, that will always be appreciated.

Adam

And speaking of which, you've mentioned things like the datacenter kind of modernization projects in terms of things like cooling and PUE, and the sort of greater stability that that customers can expect in terms of their energy bills from the large hyperscalers. But are there any other fallback or failover preparations that businesses should be putting in place now, to mitigate the impact of any potentially significant data centre energy cost rises?

Tiny

not just on energy costs, I'd make sure that the data centres have checked their failover. So they've done black building tests. So if we do have a catastrophic brownout or blackout, then all the systems have been checked. And black building tests are... the best way to describe them is a lot of panic from engineers, because you're actually switching off live systems and making sure things fail over.

Adam

Ooh.

Tiny

Yeah, exactly. So do you really want to be a lot harder on them to say, look, you know, a generator test once a week is not going to cut it, you need to show us a good failover, you want to show us also your resupply for diesel, if we have an extended period of time, or at least what we're going to do about that. As far as the energy costs themselves go, you can look at what infrastructure you've got in your current racks and see if you can switch things off or you can accelerate your migration to cloud. There are reasons why you can't go to cloud and where it's not be possible. So that's not always going to be the answer. But unnecessary equipment, if you can switch it off, power down servers when they're not needed at nighttime, I mean, this is how the cloud guys really make their money is they have this sort of shedule of switching things off, etc. And that you can do the same for servers, or at least bring them on to lower power or switch a PDU off then at least you're going to be sort of saving some money. So it's looking at the operational processes that you can do to only use what you need against also, the datacenter providers as well to make sure they're being efficient as possible, and also checking their failover systems.

Adam

I mean, it sounds a lot like the advice that kind of consumers and households are being given for bringing their energy bills down. It feels like the businesses equivalent of put on a jumper if you're cold rather than turning the heating on, but kind of writ large.

Tiny

Yeah, well, I think at the end of the day, let's take the mystique out the datacenters. I mean, they have a big bank of batteries, they have a generator and they have a lot of air conditioning, I mean they are fundamentally like your house, except you can't open a window in a datacenter; you have to use aircon.

Zach

The energy crisis isn't only going to affect datacenters, but it's going to affect every single person working in that data centre, do you think that businesses are going to increase their employee's salary to help them cope with the cost of living?

Tiny

Well this is just a general sort of cost of living question which I probably won't be the best person to answer. But I mean, each individual data centre operator will have their own employment policies. It's quite a specialist skill, which they're looking for. So you can't just simply employ minimum wage here. So you're gonna have to start paying people more to keep them. But I think what we all also are seeing is a lot of move to cloud and in cloud, costs, the skills are very difficult to find. So you might find even more pressure on engineers who are skilled in the hyperscalers, to be able to afford these guys because you know, there's even more demand for them.

Zach

During the water crisis that we went through during July and August, there was a lot of scrutiny around water companies. I think one of them opened a probe into a data centre scrutinising how it was using water. Do you think that data centres could become scapegoats in the next year or so due to how much energy they use?

Tiny

Well, the question is really, the data centres are just enabling the digital change. And if you want to do Facebook, and tweeting, and all those other things, you're living that digital life, they can't stop that service, unless the consumers stop that service. As far as water consumption in the data centres themselves go. I know a lot of the DCs are moving away from potable water to grey water, so rainwater and groundwater that they will use in their facilities, rather than using the straightforward pipe mains water. Data centres represent around about 1% of the world's electricity consumption. It's only ever gonna get more and more. They can certainly come under the gunsights of people, but I think you know that there are more lower hanging fruit like crypto mining, which is incredibly intensive usage of, of datacenter and power. So I think crypto mining might get hit before anything else does.

Adam

And I think that's a valid point to pull out is that data centres power a huge amount of not just kind of consumer services, but also critical infrastructure. You know, there's so much that we rely on as a society that is all powered by digital infrastructure, you know, healthcare systems, transport systems, all the key systems, I mean, the the energy grids themselves, are in large part powered by data centre platforms and digital infrastructure. And without that a lot of society just kind of grinds to a halt. So there's a limit to how much you can put a moratorium on that kind of activity, I think.

Tiny

yeah, I keep on trying to scare my girls by saying, just imagine your electricity supply doesn't work in the morning, you won't be able to tweet because obviously you won't be able to go online. Because there will be no mobile phone signal, or wireless when we go down, you won't be able to flush the toilet more than once because the pumps are are all consuming electricity. Your fridge is switched off, I mean, these these are apocalyptic sort of scenario. So you want to minimise that as much as possible. But yeah, we are incredibly reliant on an energy and to power our our lives. And I think that we have to be very realistic about energy security going forward. I've been talking to customers this week, more and more about data centre consolidation, seeing where the opportunities are going to be to the quick wins. The reality is a DC migration is a six to nine month process. So even if you start today, you're not necessarily going to see a way around the pain in the short term.

Adam

Well on that slightly bleak note, I'm afraid that is all we've got time for on this week's episode. But thanks once again to Gartner's Senior Director of Research Tiny Haynes for joining us.

Tiny

Thank you very much indeed for having me.

Zach

You can find links to all of the topics we spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website at itpro.co.uk.

Adam

You can also follow us on social media, as well as subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Zach

Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review.

Adam

We'll be back next week with more insight from the world of IT, but until then, goodbye.

Zach

Bye.

The global energy market is currently experiencing some extreme turmoil, with low availability resulting in steep price increases. The turbulence is particularly pronounced in the UK, where spiralling power bills are raising concerns for both consumers and businesses alike over whether or not they’ll be able to afford them.

The IT industry isn’t exempt from these challenges; in fact, thanks to the extreme power usage that data centre infrastructure requires, the risk of further price rises should be extremely worrying for cloud service providers, as well as the end customers that rely on those services. This week, we talk to Tiny Haynes, Senior Director of Research at Gartner, about what the current energy crisis could mean for the UK’s data centre ecosystem, the risk of potential outages, and how organisations can insulate themselves from some of the potential damage.

Highlights

“As far as price rises go, I can only see them going up. I would not be surprised if they are looking to double in the same way that the consumer prices are doubling. In fact, I've seen non-datacenter operators, but other organisations, seeing their prices go up by a factor of three, which possibly could happen in the datacenter market over the next six to 12 months.”

“Ireland has currently got a moratorium on new data centre build, because they just can't provide the power required for these DCs. I mean, some of these DCs, you're talking tens of megawatts of power requirements. So it might be worth some of these guys to say, Okay, what we'll do is we'll buy your datacenter for our own services, but we'll just trash all your systems and services, because we won't making any money out of that, or it might cost us too much to go and reengineer it for our own platform.”

“I've been talking to customers this week, more and more about data centre consolidation, seeing where the opportunities are going to be to the quick wins. The reality is a DC migration is a six to nine month process. So even if you start today, you're not necessarily going to see a way around the pain in the short term.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Going into the office won't save you on energy bills
• Energy as a service market poised to reach $147 billion by 2029
• Why is the energy sector so vulnerable to hacking?
• European energy company and gas pipeline hacked by AlphV ransomware
• North Korea-linked hackers target US energy sector by exploiting VMware Horizon
• Nvidia turns to liquid cooling to curb data centre energy consumption
• Singapore to resume construction on new data centres following energy efficiency review
• How do you build a green data centre?
• Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining to avoid nation-wide energy blackouts
• How UK businesses can use microgrids to dodge rising energy costs
• Singapore discourages cryptocurrency trading with new regulations
• Microsoft retrieves underwater data centre after two years
• Google shut down data centre due to multiple cooling failures
• Microsoft successfully tests emission-free hydrogen fuel cell system for data centres
• Singapore relaxes its grip on data centre industry with sustainability pilot
• Google and Oracle data centres hit by issues amidst hottest ever UK day
• The IT Pro Podcast: How Singapore became a data centre powerhouse
• Microsoft's new data centre will heat homes and businesses in Finland
• The IT Pro Podcast: Making data centres green again
• How to keep cloud costs under control
• Nine tips to improve your disaster recovery strategy

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More than a billion data-packets were sent over the UK's national smart meter network in July, a level of traffic that's expected to increase five-fold over the next four years.

The Data Communications Company (DCC), which operates the UK's smart metering network and links meters in homes and small businesses with their respective energy suppliers, said it will have to increase its working costs and operational capacity to keep pace with exceptional demand.

The DCC is investing in centralised data caching, more efficiently prioritised traffic, and widespread compression. The predicted increase in traffic will be driven in part by physical expansion, but also through changes to the frequency of readings.

In the past financial year, 8.5 million meters were added to the network, for a total of 21 million at time of writing. Around 7.6 billion messages (the DCC’s term for data packets) were sent over this period, largely comprised of meter readings but also including supplier requests, prepayment credit top-ups, and updates to tariffs and firmware. They vary in size from a few tens of bytes, to around one megabyte.

These are all sent through the bespoke internet of things (IoT) network created by the DCC, with the most sensitive information such as customer data encrypted and only given on a need-to-know basis to suppliers, network operators.

At present, some smart meters send readings every day whilst others provide readings at more frequent intervals, to supply the grid with more accurate insight into demand. The DCC states that future meters will be able to send readings every 30 minutes, an interval that they term Market-wide Half-Hourly Settlement (MHHS).

The DCC contends that they only facilitate the movement of messages through the network, and cannot see individual data.

The more up-to-date the readings are, the more consumers and businesses can make use of smart tariffs. Smart meter data is especially important in the face of the cost of living crisis, helping to keep prices accurate to consumers while providing energy suppliers with accurate information on data efficiency and demand for renewable energy.

DCC CEO Angus Flett said:

“The DCC network now relays in a single day the amount of data it was carrying in a whole month two years ago. That’s a great thing for Britain, which needs this data for the insights we require to transition away from fossil fuels.

“We’ve now surpassed 1 billion messages sent across our network in a month. We expect a further 500% increase in traffic over the next few years, as the network more than doubles in size, accommodating extra demand like half-hourly meter readings.

“The DCC network was designed for these traffic increases, and our five-year roadmap shows how we’ll be working with our customers and service providers to ensure we’re ready for this high energy data future. Our mission is to make Britain more connected, so we can all lead smarter, greener lives.”

Singapore has called on its data centre industry to submit applications to a pilot project that aims to improve sustainability across the sector.

The state’s Economic Development Board (EDB) and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) are looking to partner with industry players that want to build extra capacity and create data centres that bring in state of the art technologies.

The two organisations are also looking for best practices for sustainability, especially in the areas of energy efficiency and decarbonisation.

The pilot, which will close on 21 November 2022, is also seeking to strengthen Singapore’s international connectivity and position as a regional hub. It's hoped successful applicants will make a significant contribution to Singapore’s broader economic objectives.

EDB and IMDA are also set to continue to partner with the industry for greener data centres in the future.

“The pilot call for application exercise by EDB and IMDA seeks to leverage on the expertise and capabilities of the industry to further push the technology boundaries in these areas, and help level up the baseline for the sector, while providing new capacity for data centre growth to support our digital economy,” the two organisations said.

The state has had a moratorium on the creation of new data centres since 2019, which is concerned over the vast amount of land resource, water, and energy being consumed by data centres.

This new pilot is considered the first step towards lifting that moratorium, with new designs focusing on greater sustainability and lower resource demand.

Going forward, Singapore will have to manage the growth of its data centre capacity in a sustainable way, consistent with its climate change commitment, said the EDB and IMDA.

Since the moratorium was imposed, the EDB and IMDA said they’ve had extensive consultations with the data centre sector, their industrial customers, and sustainability solutions providers to determine the parameters for the installation of new data centre capacity.

What will Singapore authorities be looking for in the sustainable data centre proposal?

There are a number of key requirements that industry partners will have to meet. Applicants will need to demonstrate they’ve achieved a platinum certification under a prevailing Green Mark for New Data Centre criteria, a green building rating system for data centres. They will also have to design, build, and operate a data centre that is best-in-class in terms of efficiency, and achieve at least a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3 or better.

The data centre companies will also have to demonstrate optimisation of IT energy efficiency through use of equipment that meets or exceed best-in-class IT energy efficiency standards and adoption of measures with users to optimise equipment utilisation.

When it comes to decarbonisation, the applicant will need to provide proposals on how it will best achieve sustainability goals through renewable energy, and demonstrate how it plans to invest in innovative energy pathways, such as hydrogen or building integrated photovoltaics, to offset its carbon emissions footprint.

Applicants will also have to show how their proposal would strengthen Singapore’s value proposition as a key data centre and technology hub for the region, as well as Singapore’s regional/international digital connectivity.

Lastly, the data centre companies must indicate the fixed asset investments and total business expenditure for the data centre. They should also propose other desirable business activities that can contribute to the broader economic value and outcomes for Singapore, like R&D or product development.

Nokia has teamed with venture capital firm Innventure to commercialize its high-performance cooling technology targeting data centers and ‌telecommunications‌ ‌equipment.

To achieve the set goal, Innventure has founded Accelsius, which now holds the rights to Nokia Bell Labs’ cooling technology. The new firm is also responsible for the further development and commercialization of scalable technology.

Commenting on its high-performance tech, Nokia said its energy-efficient cooling technology enables direct cooling of the chip among other heat sources.

“A passive two-stage coolant circulation process enables reliable, energy-efficient heat transfer and dissipation from high-density heat sources, without using pumps. The simple to install, energy-efficient and compact cooling solution is adaptable for a broad range of critical electronic equipment and can be deployed at any scale, from a single server to large data centers,” explained Nokia.

“Energy-efficient networks and reliable cooling have always been important areas of innovation at Nokia. By collaborating with Innventure, our hugely versatile cooling technology can be offered to a broad range of companies in different industries to meet the challenge of heat densities in data centers and telecom networks while lowering energy consumption,” said Jukka Nihtila, Nokia’s vice-president of patent transactions and external alliances.

Innventure founder and CEO Bill Haskellof said, “We are very excited to build a new company around a technology that Nokia Bell Labs has been developing for more than a decade.”

“This innovative technology addresses an acute market need across the entire spectrum of networking and computing sites. It is positioned to disrupt the cooling industry as it exists today with flexible solutions that can be widely deployed for data centers and telecom,” added Haskellof.

Singapore’s use of data services is predicted to quadruple by 2030, largely driven by government policies and plans.

Efforts are now underway to provide an analysis of the current economic and environmental contributions of Singapore’s data centres, as well as how the industry could evolve under different scenarios from now until 2030, as part of new research from AlphaBeta, commissioned by AWS.

Use of data services by Singapore-based businesses is expected to surge from SGD3.1 billion (£1.8 billion) in 2021 to SGD13 billion (£7.5 billion) in 2030. The finance, insurance, and health and social services sectors are expected to see the largest annual increase in cloud demand, with a 23% increase.

The report underlined that as industries increase their pace of digital transformation and their demand for data-driven services, existing data centre capacity will soon no longer suffice and new builds will be required to meet growing needs.

“This expected increase in data needs is largely driven by key policy objectives, which support greater technology adoption,” stated the report. “Singapore’s public cloud strength is critical to evolving the nation into an advanced economy with digitalised and high-tech industries.”

Evolving government needs like smart city initiatives are fast-tracking cloud adoption and usage. Since 2018, the government has migrated most of its IT systems from on-premises data centres to commercial clouds as part of a five year cloud migration plan. The shift aims to speed up delivery and improve the quality of online services for its citizens and business ecosystem.

As of 2020, over 150 systems have been migrated to a commercial cloud and over SGD870 million (approximately £530m) of contracts have been awarded in view of doubling the number of systems on commercial clouds.

The pandemic also unexpectedly accelerated the government’s digital transformation and cloud needs, as citizens became reliant on remote work and home learning.

Although Singapore needs to add additional data centre capacity in the next decade, the government imposed a moratorium on any new data centre construction in 2019. The government aims to fully lift this soon, once new rules that place strict energy efficiency requirements on all new sites have been introduced.

The report highlighted that a green growth scenario, where data centres are constructed with energy efficiency in mind and are powered by renewable energy, can lead to over 2.8 times increase in the number of jobs and an 8.9 times increase in economic contribution. It may also lead to slower growth in energy consumption and 90% lower carbon emissions than today’s levels.

The report also warned that for Singapore to meet its sustainability goals, a minimum efficiency standard should be set for all local data centres to ensure the efficient use of scarce resources like energy and water. One option is to develop a Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact for Singapore, similar to what has been developed in Europe. This aims to help Singapore’s industry and economic growth in an environmentally friendly and resource-efficient manner. Importantly, it said that these innovations could be exported overseas, securing Singapore’s status as an innovation hub regionally and globally.

“There is a fast-growing need for the government and industry to jointly develop standards and set aspirational targets on energy and water efficiencies, the circular economy and clean energy — use that will help Singapore’s data centres achieve their sustainability goals,” said the report.

Why is Singapore a data centre hub?

Singapore is widely regarded as a leading data centre hub globally, largely thanks to its efficient digital and power infrastructure, business friendly environment, highly-skilled workforce, and stable political climate.

The number of data centres across the APAC region have grown at over 10% per annum in the past five years. Although Singapore hosts a smaller number of data centres than other countries in the region, it’s a leader in terms of data centre capacity. As of 2021, Singapore’s data centres have close to six million square feet of rack space, exceeding the capacity of countries that have more than double the number of data centre facilities, like Australia or Japan.

The country’s data centre industry contributes over SGD$2 billion (£1.1 billion) to its economy annually and 1.6 million jobs are supported by cloud computing services provided by local data centres. However, direct employment by data centres operations is limited, at around 25,000 jobs, but these tend to be highly technical and high paying, with wages 35% higher than the national average.

Around 7,000 multinational corporations (MNC) have placed their operational base in Singapore, of which 4,200 have regional headquarters that are largely dependent on local data centres. These centres help increase data security and resilience by reducing disaster-related and geopolitical risks for businesses located in Singapore, which is a strong motivator for MNCs to base their operations there.

Microsoft is set to construct a new data centre region in Finland that will also be used to heat local homes, businesses, and services.

The tech giant is collaborating with local utility provider Fortum to capture the excess heat generated by the new data centre region. Fortum will then transfer the clean heat from the server cooling process to homes, services, and business premises that are connected to its district heating system.

The companies claimed that the waste heat recycling concept from the data centre region will be the largest of its kind in the world.

District heating, the most popular method of heating premises in Finland, is infrastructure that generates and captures heat and distributes it to buildings on a large scale. Heat is transferred in hot water that is pumped through pre-insulated underground pipes.

The process makes use of Fortum’s existing district heating infrastructure, the second largest in the country, for heat capture and distribution. This includes around 900 kilometres of underground pipes that transfer heat to approximately 250,000 customers in the cities of Espoo and Kauniainen and the municipality of Kirkkonummi.

Once the waste heat capture system is up and running, around 60% of the area’s heating will be generated by climate-friendly waste heat. Of this, 40% will come from the data centre region and the rest from other waste heat sources, like purified waste water.

“The decision to invest in a data centre that also provides surplus heat to our cities and homes is a win-win,” said Sanna Marin, prime minister of Finland. “It will accelerate Finland's digital growth while making our energy system greener. I also hope that this collaboration can serve as a model to other countries and cities looking for means to achieve the double transformation of climate neutrality and digital competitiveness.”

Fortum said this new generation of district heating is based on replacing fossil fuels with renewable electricity, heat pumps, and waste heat utilisation. The company also claimed that AI will be used to optimise the operations of the entire system.

“Sometimes the most sustainable solutions are simple ones: By tapping into waste heat from data centres, we can provide clean heat for homes, businesses and public buildings in Espoo’s and the neighbouring communities’ district heating network in Finland, and reduce about 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually,” said Markus Rauramo, president and CEO of Fortum.

Microsoft has also pursued a strategy of bringing down its overall emissions, after revealing this week that its Scope 3 emissions have risen by 22.7% year-on-year.

The company, which has pledged to be carbon negative by 2030, managed to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by around 16.9% by purchasing renewable energy. Scope 3 emissions include all part of a company’s value chain, including purchased goods, waste, and business travel.

Japan has selected six companies to help power new research into green data centre technology.

The country’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO) has so far selected Fujitsu, NEC, AIO Core, Kioxia, Fujitsu Optical Components, and Kyocera to take part in the project, Fujitsu revealed today.

The project aims to address the challenge of increasing power consumption at data centres in today’s digital society. The companies taking part will work to develop innovative solutions to realise greater energy efficiency, larger capacity, and lower latency across data centres sites, ultimately contributing to net zero targets.

One of NEDO’s objectives is to achieve energy savings of 40% or more in domestic data centres by 2030, largely driven by growing energy demands across the sector.

The companies have been tasked with developing different technologies during the project:

Fujitsu: Low-power consumption CPUs and photonics smart network interface cards (NIC)

NEC: Low-power consumption accelerators and disaggregation technologies

AIO Core: Photoelectric fusion devices

Kioxia: Wideband SSD

Fujitsu Optical Components: Photonics smart NIC

Kyocera: Photonics smart NIC

Fujitsu said it will refine its microarchitecture technology, used in the supercomputer Fugaku, to develop a low-power consumption processing chip suited to data centre use. It will also work with its subsidiary Fujitsu Optical Components to develop a photonics smart network interface card (NIC) that reduces current network power consumption by applying optical transmission technology.

It hopes this will achieve greater efficiency in size and energy consumption, as well as greater data capacity, by refining software and hardware technologies.

"Fujitsu will harness this technology to deliver robust, yet environmentally-sustainable digital infrastructure that takes full advantage of Fujitsu's strengths in areas like computing and network technologies,” said Vivek Mahajan, corporate executive officer and CTO at Fujitsu.

“I am confident that our work on this initiative will help demonstrate Japan's technological capabilities, and show how Fujitsu can lead the way globally in innovation that contributes to the realisation of a carbon-neutral and sustainable society."

Singapore is planning to lift a ban on the construction of new data centres across the state following the writing of new rules that place strict energy efficiency requirements on all new sites.

The government said that it will become more selective of which data centres it can accommodate, according to Singapore’s minister for Trade and Industry Gan Kim Yong.

The government plans to only authorise new data centres that are best in class in terms of resource efficiency, which can contribute towards the country’s economic and strategic objectives, Gan said in his written reply to a question on the subject. He also revealed the government will put in place measures to raise the efficiency of existing data centres over time.

In 2019, the government embarked on a review of the data centre industry, which was recently completed. The industry will now be consulted on the results of the review to seek its feedback, at which point the exact energy efficiency requirements will be released.

“This review was necessary because while DCs [date centres] are important enablers for the digital economy, they are also intensive users of resources, and we had to find a way to manage the growth of DCs in a sustainable manner consistent with our climate change commitments,” wrote Gan.

Gan also revealed that as of 2021, Singapore has over 70 operational data centres with a total available IT capacity of around 1,000 megawatts.

In February 2021, former minister of trade Chan Chun Sing underlined that Singapore’s political stability and reliable infrastructure are conducive for operating data centres. However, he said that data centres are intensive users of water and electricity so the data centre ecosystem needed to be managed to ensure it’s environmentally sustainable, while supporting business needs.

Chan outlined that the government would strive for quality, not quantity, and that it would secure data centres that were best in class in terms of resource efficiency, and that push the boundaries of resource efficiency in a tropical climate.

He said that in the last five years, 14 data centres with a total IT capacity of 768 MW were approved for construction on industrial state land, a rapid increase compared to the 12 data centres with a capacity of 307 MW in the preceding five year period. This has led the government moderating the growth of data centres with a temporary pause on the release of state land for their construction and development.

Mozilla has temporarily suspended the option to donate cryptocurrencies to the Mozilla Foundation following backlash from users.

The announcement came mere days after the non-profit organisation issued a statement over Twitter reminding its followers that they can make a donation using bitcoin payment service provider BitPay.

This was met with criticism from environmental activists and software developers alike, with Mozilla’s original founder Jamie Zawinski stating that the organisation “should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters”.

April King, who created the site testing tool Mozilla Observatory and the Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator before leaving the organisation in 2020 to join Twitter, said that she “cannot begin to express” her disappointment with the decision to accept cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies have been tied to excessive energy use, with a recent Cambridge University research finding that the annual consumption of Bitcoin is greater than the total energy consumption of the Philippines, which has a population of 110 million. Another study found that only 39% of the electricity powering the Bitcoin mining process comes from renewable sources, with a hefty 61% coming from power stations fuelled by natural gas, oil, and coal.

Twitter users were also quick to point out that supporting cryptocurrencies is at odds with Mozilla’s commitment to reducing emissions and becoming a carbon-neutral organisation.

On Thursday, Mozilla announced that it is “reviewing if and how our current policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals”.

“And as we conduct our review, we will pause the ability to donate cryptocurrency,” the organisation said in a statement posted to Twitter.

In a response published hours later on his blog, Zawinski said that he is “happy” to have contributed to having Mozilla “rescind that terrible decision”.

However, the option to donate using cryptocurrency may return in the future, with Mozilla adding that “decentralized web technology continues to be an important area (...) to explore”.

The news of the temporary suspension comes hours after Kosovo became the latest nation to ban cryptocurrency mining in an effort to curb energy consumption following a series of blackouts across the country.

Mozilla isn’t the only organisation to face backlash over its stance on cryptocurrencies; Tesla suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin last year due to its high energy use, with the company shifting its attention to alternative, more sustainable cryptocurrencies.

Kosovo has become the latest nation to ban cryptocurrency mining in an effort to curb energy consumption following a series of blackouts across the country.

Minister of Economy, Artane Rizvanolli, said the decision was based on recommendations made by Kosovo’s Technical Committee on the Emergency Measures in Energy Supply.

In contrast to a similar policy passed in China, Kosovo’s ban on cryptocurrency mining aims to help limit the affects of the ongoing energy crisis affecting a number of European countries, including Kosovo.

The country, which was declared independent from neighbouring Serbia in 2008 and has been considered a cryptocurrency mining haven due to its low electricity bills, is currently struggling with what is considered to be the “worst energy crisis in a decade”. The government has introduced power cuts and a national state of emergency that is expected to last until late February.

In a statement shared on Facebook, Rizvanolli said that the ban will also include identifying “the locations of cryptocurrency production”. These are considered to be based in northern Kosovo, where the country’s Serb minority, many of whom are Serbian government sympathisers and don’t acknowledge Kosovo as an independent state, partake in cryptocurrency mining while also refusing to pay the electricity bills, according to BBC.

The news comes days after the Iranian government reportedly placed a temporary ban on all cryptocurrency mining in order to avoid electricity blackouts, according to BNN Bloomberg. Expected to last until 6 March 2022, the ban aims to free up 209 megawatts of power.

Although mining and trading cryptocurrencies is legal in Iran, the country’s banks and financial institutions have been prohibited from dealing with cryptocurrencies since 2018 in an effort to clamp down on money laundering and limit routes for funding terrorism.

Cryptocurrencies have also been criticised due to its negative environmental impact, with a recent University of Cambridge study finding that only 39% of the electricity powering the Bitcoin mining process comes from renewable sources, with a hefty 61% coming from power stations fuelled by natural gas, oil, and coal.

In May 2021, New York lawmakers submitted a bill banning cryptocurrency mining operations for three years, citing concerns that “associated greenhouse gas emissions will irreparably harm compliance with the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in contravention of state law”.

AWS and IBM are joining forces to combine their cloud tools for oil companies to use to help them manage their data while allowing them to overcome barriers like data residency requirements.

The two companies will combine the IBM Open Data for Industries for IBM Cloud Pak for Data and the AWS Cloud to serve energy customers. This is built on Red Hat OpenShift and will run on the AWS Cloud in order to make it easier for customers to run workloads on the platform and on-premises.

The collaboration, which aims to reduce data barriers in the energy industry, will allow customers to run OSDU Data Platform applications, an open source data platform for the energy industry, while addressing data residency requirements.

The companies claim that their energy customers are facing pressure to reduce greenhouse gases as demand for affordable energy continues to rise. To do this, companies need new products to help them drive efficiencies to free up capital, time, and resources to invest in new sustainable energy sources for the future.

IBM and AWS said that data and digital technologies can help navigate this transition, although an IBM survey from last year found that less than half of oil and gas executive respondents are using data to drive this innovation. The two companies underlined that this is partly because most of the digitisation efforts have been in proprietary closed systems, hindering the ability to combine and maximise the value of data.

"Much of the data needed to solve the complex energy challenges, such as superior subsurface decisions, already exists, yet is untapped. This is because one of the greatest values of that data is derived when it can be effectively combined, but usually this data is locked by data residency requirements, legacy applications or proprietary data formats," said Bill Vass, vice president of engineering at AWS.

"By collaborating with IBM and leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, we will be able to offer customers a global, seamless offering with the flexibility to run on virtually any IT infrastructure and drive longer-term digital innovation."

In October, Amazon also announced it invested in three companies developing sustainable technologies through its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund programme. The fund was announced in 2020 to support sustainable investments, and these latest funding agreements brought its portfolio of companies to 11.

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For governments and innovators around the globe, tackling climate change has become a leading cause – with many startups also rising to the challenge. Whether it's by improving battery storage technology or using machine learning to monitor emissions, a growing section of the UK tech ecosystem is vying to deliver positive environmental change. Can a new generation of startups really make a difference, though, while also delivering a profit for investors and shareholders?

Independent digital innovation agency, Supercharge, has previously worked with Zenobe, a provider of clean energy battery storage products for electric vehicles and public transport networks. Its UK managing director, Daniel Homoki-Farkas, believes global recent events will drive more early-stage businesses, like Zenobe, to the fore, with Homoki-Farkas pinpointing the electrification of deliveries for e-commerce, and energy storage, as two key growth areas.

“The changes the pandemic has forced upon how we live have opened many people’s eyes to the fragility of the environment, and the damaging effects of human behaviour upon it,” he tells IT Pro. “Individuals and companies, alike, are taking a fresh look at our environment and what new ways of living and doing business are needed not only to preserve it – but to improve it.

A greener class of tech founders

With much of the tech sector adopting sustainability targets, investors in startups are also examining how they can contribute to this wave of change. Since 2012, Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) has been investing in companies that aim to build solutions to a variety of social and environmental challenges. The firm has awarded funding to 141 organisations that, it says, have positively affected the lives of 17 million people.

BGV's brand and communications manager, Milly Shotter, believes startups aiming to develop technology for the wider good can still be attractive to fund. “Tech startups targeting environmental issues can absolutely serve the common good while making a financial return for investors,” Shotter argues. “In fact, we'd go one step further and say they’ll be some of the most valuable companies of the future. Many of the world's largest asset owners have acknowledged that climate risk is financial risk, and if we don't invest in companies that mitigate this, the repercussions will be felt by all.”

She adds it’s important to BGV that companies have a hypothesis of how they’ll measure and manage the impact they’re hoping to achieve. The approach to investment also depends on whether the technology is innovative in and of itself, or whether it’s a standard use of technology applied to a new market.

"For the former,” she explains, “we'd expect the founders to have strong technical expertise. For the latter, we believe 'technical intuition' is enough, provided they can communicate with developers. Greenwashing is a risk in this space so this helps to avoid that. In the early stages, it can help simplify things by asking what is the one key metric you'll measure?”

One of BGV’s portfolio companies Nuw, a sustainable fashion firm, worked with the London Waste and Recycling Board to develop a carbon calculator that helps them understand how much carbon is saved with each ‘swap’ made through its platform.

Another innovative environmental start-up is Dryad Networks, a for-profit, tech-for-good, business established after co-founder Carsten Brinkschulte saw the devasting impact of the 2019 Australian wildfires. The firm has built a large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) system to detect fires at the smouldering stage, using solar-powered gas sensors, or ‘digital noses’, and gateways attached to trees, alongside a patent-pending distributed mesh architecture. Dryad aims to save one million hectares of forest from burning by 2030, avoid 400 million tonnes of CO2 emissions and save the lives of millions of plants and animals while preventing substantial economic losses.

Despite the fact so many startups have such worthy goals, Brinkschulte believes the biggest challenge is getting funding. There’s still no better time to launch a venture than now, he insists, adding: "Environmental issues will take priority for the next decade. General awareness of environmental issues and the need to act fast has never been greater, and this pressure for action is fuelling the market for environmental solutions. COP26 should certainly increase visibility for environmental start-ups and also provide a platform for networking and fundraising.”

Mining data for greener outcomes

At Subak, an accelerator that funds and scales environmental non-profits, a huge challenge is acquiring the best data to create the most effective change. "We regularly see difficulties around finding key data sets; connecting disparate information and data quality,” says the firm’s head of technology, Laurence Watson. “Even though there’s more climate data than ever before, it’s not always open, discoverable or well-documented. Work is often duplicated because openness is not the default.”

To combat this, everyone within the Subak network shares their data, tools and learnings to help each other achieve their climate missions faster. For those hoping to launch a company in this space, but perhaps lacking the technical knowledge, Watson adds: "We work with organisations with a clear idea of how they are going to make an impact on climate change using data. The tech capability follows from there, and we focus on helping level them up, and ensure they have the right skills internally. We don't expect incredible technical capability right away – that's where we can help – but we do need to see a great vision and a clear path to impact."

There’s still the thorny matter of tech's own emissions, however. Michelle You, co-founder and CEO of Supercritical, whose software allows companies to measure their climate impact, believes the way forward is for startups to communicate what net-zero actually means to both themselves and their customers.

"We know leading tech companies have already made bold net-zero commitments,” she says. “Tech leaders understand the urgency of climate change and what it means to be an early adopter, so I expect to see more and more tech founders and CEOs using carbon removal technologies as a core pillar of their net-zero strategies."

Provided by

Wind and solar are fast-becoming the renewable energies of choice in countries across the globe. But both of these resources still require significant technological advancements and investment in energy storage and distribution to compensate for their inherent intermittency.

Nuclear and hydro-power offer alternative energy sources that don’t generate CO2 and don’t have the same continuity problems, though these too have drawbacks, including the potential environmental impact of each.

Carbon capture and storage technologies have the potential to de-carbonise fossil-fuel, biomass and waste-to-energy power. Advances in battery storage and grid technology with ground source heat pumps are also creating opportunities in the energy mix as they can be applied as part of an integrated approach to CO2-free energy solutions.

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Employees were evacuated from a testing plant near Melbourne, Australia on Friday after a fire broke out inside a Tesla Megapack battery container.

The fire started during the trial of the Victorian Big Battery energy project near Melbourne, run by French-firm Neoen who had contracted Tesla to deliver and operate the Megapack system.

Over 30 fire trucks and support vehicles and around 150 firefighters from the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and Fire Rescue Victoria (FRV) responded to the incident, which started at 10:30am local time.

Upon closer inspection, firefighters found a 13-tonne lithium battery on fire inside a shipping container. Crews wearing breathing apparatus worked to quickly contain the blaze and prevented it from spreading to nearby batteries.

A warning was issued for toxic smoke for local residents who were advised to close windows and doors, turn off heating and cooling systems, and bring pets indoors. A scientific officer conducted atmospheric monitoring on the scene and FRV’s specialist drone unit was also deployed to monitor the fire.

“There was one battery pack on fire to start with, but it did spread to a second pack that was very close to it,” said CFA incident controller and District 7 acting assistant chief fire officer Ian Beswicke. “The plan is that we keep it cool on the outside and protect the exposures so it doesn’t cause any issues for any of the other components in the power station.”

Beswicke added that the CFA will continue to monitor the situation overnight. The cause of the fire is still undetermined and will be investigated “once it is safe to do so”.

A spokesperson from Neoen told IT Pro that no one was injured during the fire and the site had been evacuated.

"The site has been disconnected from the grid and there will be no impact to the electricity supply," said the spokesperson, adding that the fire is now out and the situation is being monitored.

IT Pro has contacted Tesla for comment.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter “Prometheus Unbound” following the news of the fire at the battery site, referring to the god of fire.

The Victorian Big Battery project aims to support the Australian state’s mission of using 40% renewable energy by 2025 and 50% by 2030. It uses Tesla’s Megapack technology, which is designed for grid-scale commercial projects. Each Megapack is pre-assembled with battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker, and controls in one enclosure.

In April, Texas police investigating the Tesla car that crashed without any passengers in the driver’s seat were set to serve the company a warrant for the vehicle’s data. Theories emerged that the vehicle was in ‘autopilot’ mode when it careered off a bend at high speed.

Furthermore, the crash highlighted concerns around hard-to-extinguish fires when it comes to electric cars, according to The Washington Post. Officials said the battery inside the vehicle ignited after the collision, causing a fire that burnt for four hours and required over 30,000 gallons of water to extinguish.

Elon Musk caused the price of Bitcoin to fall last night after announcing that Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin due to the huge amount of energy required to power the cryptocurrency.

The electric car firm will no longer sell Bitcoin or allow customers to purchase vehicles using the digital token due to concerns about the increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially the use of coal.

Musk, who has repeatedly advocated for cryptocurrencies as a spending vehicle, said his firm will look at supporting alternative cryptocurrencies that consume less than 1% of the energy that Bitcoin does, instead.

As Bitcoin’s popularity has continued to grow, the amount of energy consumption required to power the cryptocurrency has grown in parallel. According to the University of Cambridge, Bitcoin consumes roughly 148 Terawatt hours (TWh).

By way of comparison, the nations of Argentina, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates consume 121 TWh, 109 Twh, and 113 Twh respectively. Bitcoin’s power consumption was only 39 TWh in 2017, according to Digiconomist.

“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at a great cost to the environment,” Musk said.

“Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy. We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”

Musk has long been seen as one of the tech industry’s greatest proponents of cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin in particular. Only in February his company invested roughly $1.5 billion (approximately £1 billion) in Bitcoin, which the Bank of America estimated is the equivalent to the carbon footprint of the annual emissions of nearly two million cars.

Critics at the time derided the move given Tesla's previous commitment to be an environmentally friendly company. Information regarding the accelerating energy consumption of Bitcoin has been widely documented and was, at the time of Tesla’s investment, freely available online.

Musk had wanted to use Bitcoin as a means for paying for Tesla vehicles, with the $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin granting the firm the liquidity once it started to accept payments.

This decision follows several other companies in announcing support for Bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies more widely. PayPal, for example, now allows users to trade using Bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies, while Mastercard last year announced it would begin supporting some cryptocurrencies, but not those used predominantly as an investment vehicle, likely ruling out support for Bitcoin and other mainstream cryptocurrencies.

The news that Tesla was dropping support for Bitcoin over environmental concerns sparked a price drop, and adds to a growing mood of anxiety about the ecological consequences of cryptocurrency mining - Bitcoin, in particular.

As for the cryptocurrencies Musk may look to as an alternative, Ether consumes roughly 10 times less power than Bitcoin per transaction, according to TRG Data Centres, at 63 KWh versus 707 KWh. Litecoin, meanwhile, consumes 19 KWh per transaction, Dogecoin consumes 0.12 KWh, and XRP consumes 0.0079 KWh.

Google Cloud has launched the Carbon-Free Energy Percentage (CFE%), a metric that allows customers to find its greenest data centers.

The CFE% provides climate-conscious customers with a number that reflects the average mix of carbon-free and fossil-fuel energy that is used to power Google's data centers in each region. The higher the percentage, the more carbon-free power was used at that particular region.

For example, Google's Iowa data center has a CFE% of 78%, which means that data center applications in this region are, on average, running on carbon-free energy more than three-quarters of the time.

Google began buying enough carbon credits and renewable energy to offset its fossil fuel usage in 2007, and since 2017, the company had purchased enough solar and wind energy to match 100% of its global electricity consumption

However, like most technology firms striving for a green cloud the company still uses fossil fuels to power some of its operations. In September 2020, Google announced plans to abandon fossil fuels completely by 2030, using renewable energy for each local data enter drawn from the same regional grid.

Today's announcement helps track the company's progress. Each CFE% metric is calculated hourly by monitoring which power plants are feeding the grid, along with the amount of clean energy that Google is contributing.

The data also shows the regional grid's carbon intensity by calculating carbon emissions per unit of energy from that regional grid.

The company doesn't yet have data to cover all its regions, with most of its Asian sites missing. However, the figures show Europe and the US outperforming Asia and Australia, reflecting the advances made in renewable energy in the West. While Taiwan has a CFE% of 19% and Singapore just 3%, Oregon - the leading region - has 89%.

Still, not all US regions were equal. South Carolina lagged at 19%, while Las Vegas limped on 13%. The company's Sydney data center also under-performed compared to most of Europe and North America with a CFE% of just 11%.

Google advises customers concerned about green energy to use this data, along with the cloud's ability to move workloads around. Assuming data residency requirements allow it, companies can pick cleaner regions for new applications and batch jobs and can also use policies to restrict the regions they use, helping them to meet their own internal guidelines.

Google's wasn't the only big tech energy announcement this week, as Apple also announced that it has helped to create 1.2 gigawatts of energy via its green bonds.

The company began releasing these bonds, which fund environmental projects to reduce its carbon footprint, in 2016. It has now committed $4.7 billion to the bonds, which complement its Clean Energy Program. Apple funded a total of 17 green bond projects last year, which will eliminate an average of 921,000 metric tons of carbon emissions annually, it said.

Higher bitcoin prices lead to more carbon emissions, analysts from the Bank of America's research team have warned.

There has been a “relatively linear relationship between bitcoin prices and bitcoin energy use”, the bank claimed in a new report, largely because higher prices attract more miners around the world, seeking bigger rewards.

“The rising complexity of the system creates ultimately a vicious environmental cycle of rising prices, rising hashpower, rising energy consumption and, ultimately, rising CO2 emissions," the research team concluded, as as reported by Yahoo! Finance.

The bank calculated that a $1bn investment in bitcoin would produce the same carbon emissions as the annual output of 1.2m cars due to energy usage associated with bitcoin.

This means Tesla’s $1.5bn(£1bn) investment in bitcoin is equivalent to the carbon footprint of the annual emissions of 1.8m cars.

Last month, Tesla announced it was going to invest $1.5bn into bitcoin, with some critics pointing out this undermines the electric car manufacturer's green credentials.

Bank of America also argued that because bitcoin is not tied to inflation and remains “exceptionally volatile”, this makes it impractical as a mechanism for storing wealth, or as a system of payments.

“As such, the main portfolio argument for holding bitcoin is not diversification, stable returns, or inflation protection, but rather sheer price appreciation, a factor that depends on Bitcoin demand outpacing supply,” stated the bank.

Its research found that the bitcoin network’s energy usage is already comparable to countries like Greece and the Netherlands, and that the cryptocurrency’s estimated energy consumption has grown over 200% in the past two years.

Moreover, it found that 75% of the network’s computer power is based in China, where over half of all electricity comes from high polluting coal-fired plants. The bank also wrote that a single bitcoin purchase at a price of $50,000 has a carbon footprint of 270 tons, the equivalent of 60 ICE[petrol/diesel] cars.

In the past, financial institutions have taken a hardline stance against emerging cryptocurrencies. The Bank of America has remained sceptical of technologies like blockchain, even though it held the most patents for it. In March 2019, it held 82 blockchain-related patents, more than any other financial firm.

This attitude towards blockchain and cryptocurrencies has changed in recent years, with banks like JP Morgan even revealing its own cryptocurrency. Dubbed 'JPM coin', this currency was limited to internal transactions and settlements.

Mastercard hinted in February that it will soon support cryptocurrencies however, a host of restrictions, such as only supporting currencies that encourage spending, rather than investment, make it unlikely that bitcoin will make its way to the platform.

Solar software provider Aurora Solar today announced it’s raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by privately held investment firm ICONIQ Capital.

The round also saw participation from Aurora’s existing investors, including Energize Ventures, Fifth Wall and Pear VC. Aurora says the funding is the largest single investment ever made in the renewable energy market.

While Aurora hasn’t earmarked the $50 million for any specific projects yet, it plans to use the funds to enhance its offering by hiring more talent, developing new features and services to help solar installers sell more solar, improving workflow for solar sales consultants, and delivering a modern customer experience.

Aurora’s software platform allows solar installers to perform many essential operations, including accurately performing remote solar shading analysis, designing solar and storage systems, forecasting energy production, calculating bill savings, and generating sales proposals with financing options. Additionally, the platform replaces solar companies’ manual processes with online digital forms and workflows.

These remote operations were initially conveniences that made solar-energy planning and selling easier. Today, distance selling has become increasingly critical to the solar energy industry amid stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19 spikes nationwide.

"Aurora has become the preeminent software platform for solar installers, with product functionality and an end-user experience that is far ahead of the competition," said Doug Pepper, general partner at ICONIQ Capital.

Pepper continued, "We're looking forward to joining the board and supporting Chris, Sam, and the Aurora team on their exceptional growth trajectory to enable the solar industry to scale for a more sustainable future."

"This fundraise is not only a big milestone for Aurora, but for the solar industry," said Christopher Hopper, co-founder of Aurora Solar. "It will allow us to continue to build best-in-class tools for solar professionals in the U.S. and internationally, and help us achieve our mission of creating a future powered by clean solar energy."

BloombergNEF digital Industry analysts predict a 22% year-over-year growth for the U.S. residential solar market next year. The analysis found solar companies transitioning to online sales and solar design during the lockdowns will drive the anticipated growth.

"Solar has emerged as one of the key future energy sources, and Aurora is increasingly the go-to solution for solar installers who are looking to affordably deploy solar at scale," said Samuel Adeyemo, co-founder of Aurora Solar. "The pandemic has accelerated trends towards remote processes, and we are delighted to have the resources to build all the tools that will help the industry thrive in this new environment."

It’s been quite the week for green IT. On Monday, Google announced it’s aiming to go carbon free by 2030 (something 1,000 of its employees demanded back in November last year), while Facebook upped the ante by declaring it will be powered by 100% renewable energy by the end of the year.

Then on Tuesday an experimental Microsoft data centre was raised from the depths of the sea off Orkney.

Finally, on Wednesday Apple announced at its September special event that its Taptic Engine, which generates the iPhone’s haptic feedback, will be made using only recycled rare earth minerals. It will no longer ship charging cables with its Apple Watch units either, ostensibly in the name of reducing e-waste.

It’s an inconvenient fact that our dependence on technology has a negative impact on the environment in multiple ways. While rare earth metals aren’t actually as rare as the name would suggest – in fact, they’re some of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust – destructive mining is required to extract them from the ground for use in our devices.

Data centres, meanwhile, require an extraordinary amount of energy to run. Currently, they account for about 1% of the world’s energy consumption, with the majority of that coming from cloud and hyperscale computing. With the increasing use of cloud in particular following the shift to increased remote working in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this will undoubtedly grow. The good news, though, is that data centres have got more efficient over time, with energy usage as a percentage of the global total having largely plateaued since 2015.

It’s encouraging, then, to see some of the biggest tech companies out there taking concrete steps towards reducing their impact on the environment. While it’s important for us as individuals to respect the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra for consumption, it’s big businesses and nation states that can make the biggest impact to reduce climate change and mitigate their impact on the environment.

That’s not to say it’s all rosey: Cloud and hyperscale data centres are often sprawling facilities, so there will be a significant ecological impact each time one is built. And, as Facebook has acknowledged, wastewater management is something that needs to be dealt with, for example with closed loop systems. For end users, either as consumers or businesses, electronics recycling needs to become simpler if we want to encourage more people to get rid of old and broken electronics responsibly. For manufacturers, we need to move to a point where using recycled components and elements is more cost effective than mining and manufacturing new ones.

But any step in the right direction is to be commended and this week has shown there’s a lot of possibilities for ecologically sustainable and responsible business in the tech industry.

The changes the coronavirus pandemic has forced upon us are leading many to take a long look at the way we live and the effect it has on the environment. We’ve seen dramatic improvements to air quality thanks to so many people staying home, and there’s a lot of talk about how we might do things differently as lockdown restrictions ease and we create a “new normal”.

When it’s safe to go back to the office, we may find more people choose to continue working remotely for example, as many have discovered that they’re able to work productively from home.

Removing the daily commute is obviously good for the environment, but there is another issue that we need to consider: going digital does not equate to going carbon neutral. In fact, the Paris-based Shift Project says that “digital technology is currently doing more to fuel global warming than prevent it”.

What is digital pollution?

Dubbed ‘digital pollution’, the greenhouse gases that come from building, delivering and using digital technology currently make up 4% of global greenhouse emissions – double that of the global aviation industry.

Millions of physical servers in data centres around the world are running 24/7 in order to transmit all our data, and every year energy consumption from digital technology increases by 9%.

While consumer use is a big contributor – streaming services represent 20% of greenhouse gas emissions from digital devices – business also has a role to play in reducing our digital carbon footprint and needs to look towards more efficient ways of working and storing/sharing data.

Every time we use the Internet a small amount of carbon is being emitted. Searching for something on Google has a price, as each internet request represents 7g of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Sending or receiving an email emits 4g of CO2e and even unopened spam emails pollute, as they still use 0.3g of carbon dioxide.

”Whilst that may not sound like much, the average office worker sends 120 emails a day, meaning that a business housing 50 employees generates 6,264kg (6.2 tonnes) of carbon emissions a year,” says James Harper, marketing manager at manufacturing firm Viessmann. “This is almost the equivalent of taking two return plane journeys a year from London to Hong Kong, which emits 6,800kg (6.8 tonnes) of CO2e between the four trips.”

Why should businesses care?

Taking responsibility for and lowering digital carbon footprints goes beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR); it’s good business sense.

Customers and employees alike are now very aware of the climate crisis, notes Vaughan Lindsay, CEO of ClimateCare, a profit for purpose environmental and social impact company. Most of all they’re very aware of the environmental responsibilities of the firms they work with, buy from and the organisations they are employed by.

“As such, they’re selecting organisations that fit with their own purpose-led principles. This ranges from organisations seeking to use greener data centres and communicating to their customer base through their CSR communications, to individuals who are increasingly buying on a matter of principle,” he says.

“Ultimately, as Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, recently said; ‘Firms that align their business models to the transition to a carbon-neutral world will be rewarded handsomely; those that fail to adapt will cease to exist’.”

Steps you can take

Many businesses are already recording their digital pollution. The Climate Change Act 2008 set out a legally-binding commitment for the UK to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% of 1990 levels by 2020, and under Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR), large businesses have a legal requirement to report and reduce their energy and greenhouse gas emissions.

Research by digital marketing agency Sustainable Results Labs found that many small businesses are also reporting on their annual carbon footprints as part of their commitment to reduce their environmental impact.

By collecting this information, businesses of all sizes are able to see what’s causing the most digital pollution and act accordingly. And there are many tools available to provide support in this area. For example, Microsoft recently launched a sustainability calculator to help businesses analyse the carbon emissions of their IT infrastructure, and applications such as Cleanfox remove unwanted and unnecessary emails from your inbox.

Ruth Smith, director of Sustainable Results Lab, has seen several IT services management departments aim to reduce their digital pollution through greater use of automation to reduce manual, inefficient ways of working.

“If you can automate a workflow you can reduce the number of emails you send, which not only saves time and money; it also reduces your digital carbon footprint. Ensure systems and processes are as efficient as possible. It’s about making sure that you make as much impact as possible through an evidenced-based approach to everything you do,” she notes.

Some businesses are going as far as to make management of digital pollution part of a role.

“We have a head of operations who’s responsible for managing how efficient we are and as part of that role is looking at our digital carbon footprint. When we’re looking at renewals, or coming to the end of contracts, there’s a big focus on finding sustainable solutions,” says Luke Tobin, commercial director of marketing agency Digital Ethos.

All steps make a difference, and there are a few simple changes businesses can make to start reducing their digital carbon footprint. These include advising staff to unsubscribe from spam/junk emails even if they don’t open them, use Wi-Fi over 4G and look towards – where suitable – using USB sticks or external hard drives to store files rather than in the cloud.

This is something implemented at Housebuyers4U, where staff continuously look for new ways to manage their digital carbon footprint.

“We do a few things such as encouraging workers to talk to each other rather than sending mass emails and use USBs to transfer some files rather than storing them digitally – this limits our use of the cloud,” says Paul Gibbens, marketing executive. “We also remove unused apps and software we don’t need, try to download rather than stream and focus on improving our SEO so we only attract the people who need or want our service.”

The role of data centres

Power hungry data centres are unlikely to become obsolete, but Lindsay points out that they do have a real opportunity here to raise the bar – highlighting Microsoft’s move to offset all its past and current emissions. He also notes that end users should ensure they only use ‘green’ data centres.

“Businesses will need to do their due diligence and research here. When speaking to data centres they should ask for efficiency certificates and green credentials, and find out whether they offset residual emissions.”

Businesses have a responsibility to educate their staff on digital pollution and instigate culture changes that will help manage and reduce digital pollution. Many might not be aware of the cost of sending that unnecessary ‘thank you’ email, but small changes across the board will help us move towards the UK’s net zero goal by 2050. It’s possible to meet it – but only if we start to take responsibility for the digital pollution we create today

We’re living in something of a post-truth age. Things are stated as fact, with little or no evidence to back them up. Claims about products and technologies are made without being challenged. And few areas are subject to the pulping of the truth more than so-called green technology.

Innovations, ideas and schemes arrive that are meant to make the planet greener. But when you start chipping away at the veneer of these claims or truisms, there’s often little to back them up.

Here, I’m going to investigate five common claims about “green” technology to see if there is any truth behind them and whether you’re doing any good for the environment by adhering to them – or whether you’re simply being hoodwinked.

Dark mode saves battery life

Dark mode is currently de rigueur. Android, iOS, Windows and macOS all now have their own dark modes, turning the background to menus and apps to a dark shade of charcoal.

Dark mode reportedly has two plus points. The first is a health benefit: dark mode spares your eyes from the strain of looking at a bright screen, reducing the so-called blue light that can keep you awake at night. That said, hard medical evidence that darker screens reduce eye strain or improve sleep is difficult to find.

The other benefit is that dimming the screen with dark backgrounds puts less strain on the device’s battery, meaning your smartphone, tablet or laptop should last for longer between charges. While that may sound perfectly logical, it’s not necessarily true.

Dark mode’s ability to preserve battery life depends on the type of screen your device uses. LCD screens light all their pixels from the edges, so it makes no difference in terms of battery life whether your phone is showing an all-white image or an all-black one.

Only on high-end devices with OLED screens could dark mode offer battery-saving benefits. OLED displays have each pixel lit individually, so if the image is jet black, the pixel will simply switch its backlight off. That’s why the so-called always-on screens on devices such as Samsung Galaxy handsets have a black background –only a tiny proportion of the overall pixels need to be switched on to display the time and notifications, making a small dent in overall battery life.

While the display is one of the big drains on battery life, it’s not the only factor. Background processing, the strength of your mobile signal and the various wireless radios all take their toll too, so it’s unlikely that switching on dark mode is going to make a substantial difference to your battery life. It falls into the “every little helps” rather than “game changer” category.

It’s greener to run a laptop on batteries when fully charged

This one comes from the energy supplier, Octopus Energy. When I was browsing its website a little pop-up appeared: “Carbon emissions from electricity are currently high,” it read. “Your battery is at 97%, so you might like to unplug for a few hours.”

Once I’d got over the mild shock of websites being able to read the current state of my laptop’s battery without any permission ever being granted (to the best of my knowledge, at least), it got me thinking. Is it really more eco-friendly to run the laptop on battery power until it needs a charge, much like a phone?

First, let’s consider how much energy a laptop would chomp through. In my case, it’s a three-year-old Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga X1 first generation, which consumes between 20W to 35W when in use, according to the readings from my TP-Link smart plug. That’s about 0.2kWh of electricity over the course of an eight-hour working day (excluding any peripherals plugged in).

In other words, the laptop isn’t a massive energy sump. If I stuck my 1,800W dishwasher on for an hour, it would consume almost ten times the energy of running my laptop all day.

Still, if we’re going to stop Birmingham becoming a seaside town in the next few years, every little helps. So, what are the energy pros and cons of unplugging the laptop and letting it cruise on battery power for a few hours?

The laptop is obviously sucking nothing out of the grid when it’s unplugged, but it’s not going to be as efficient on battery power as it is when chained to the mains. Windows and Mac laptops will automatically drop into a power-saving mode when the cord is pulled, which chokes processor performance and dims the screen to maintain battery life. The performance dip probably won’t make a tangible difference if you’re word processing or browsing the web, but it’s going to slow things down if you’re doing heavy lifting: Photoshop work, video editing and so on. If your Windows laptop dips below 20%, it will enter Battery Saving mode, where background app activity and notifications are limited.

You can override the automatic power saving and plough on at full pelt, but that will obviously crimp your battery life, maybe giving you only an hour or two off the mains, instead of three or four. Either way, regularly unplugging the laptop and running on batteries – even when you have mains available – is going to increase the number of charge cycles you put the battery through.

Most laptop batteries are designed to last for around 400 to 500 charge cycles. As mine is plugged into the mains most of the time, my three-year-old battery has only been through 167 charge cycles at the time of writing, but if I was following Octopus’ advice and unplugging when fully charged, the battery would by now need replacing. That means more raw materials, such as the lithium the battery is made from, as well as the environmental costs of manufacture, shipping and the repair itself (it’s a sealed unit laptop, so I couldn’t replace the battery myself).

It’s even dubious if there’s any energy saving to be made by unplugging the laptop for a few hours in the first place, because when you plug it back in and the battery needs charging, the power drain shoots up to around 45W – around double the energy that it was using when merely plugged into the mains. If it takes a couple of hours to fully recharge the laptop, that’s going to be, at best, a negligible power saving.

To be fair, Octopus’ message was arguably aimed at reducing energy consumption at peak times, when there’s not enough renewable energy to satisfy the grid. Still, unplugging your laptop for a few hours when there’s a socket available doesn’t seem a smart environmental move.

Cloud desktops use less energy than client PCs

There is a growing shift towards desktop as a service (DaaS). Microsoft recently launched Windows Virtual Desktop for enterprise customers, joining long-established firms such as IBM and VMware with DaaS services. Meanwhile, in the gaming world, Shadow hosts virtual Windows desktops from its data centres in France, replicating the performance of a dedicated gaming PC on any Windows, Mac or mobile device. Google is launching Stadia and Microsoft is pushing ahead with Project xCloud to let you stream Xbox games over the internet.

The idea behind all of these services is that you don’t need to buy powerful new client hardware to sit in your home or office. Simply stream the content from the data centre to pretty much any internet-connected device in the home. That’s got to be good for the environment too, right? No need to build and ship expensive, power-hungry PCs and consoles to people any more. Just use low-powered client devices and let the more efficient data centres take the brunt. Well, it’s not quite as clear cut as you might think.

A study published last year into “Green Gaming” by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the overall energy footprint of cloud gaming services was often higher than consoles, laptops and even desktop PCs. “Media streaming devices are by far the least energy intensive gaming technology locally,” the researchers found, “although when running cloud-based gaming services a far larger workload manifests in data centres and intervening networks.

“We have estimated that a 10W local media streaming device can entail an additional 520W of power (more than most local PCs) in the upstream network together with the data centre hosting the servers performing the graphics processing.”

All told, cloud gaming “adds approximately 40 to 60% to the otherwise total local annual electricity use for desktops, 120 to 300% for laptops, 30 to 200% for consoles, and 130 to 260% for media streaming devices”. So while your personal energy consumption might drop if you use a cloud desktop, the overall energy impact could be much greater.

That’s potentially bad news for the environment, because cloud gaming in particular is expected to grow hugely in popularity over the next decade, as ultrafast broadband connections become more common and consumers grow ever-more accustomed to the model of buying hardware on subscription.

“Gaming already represents one-fifth of the total miscellaneous residential energy use, and is expected to rise significantly due to the overall growth and the shift to both higher-end PC gaming and cloud gaming,” Gary Cook, a spokesperson for Greenpeace, says.

“While some of this additional energy demand could be transitioned to renewable energy if the data centre is in a location/run by a company who is buying renewable energy to power their data centre, the growth in energy demand associated with cloud gaming regardless of the hardware is an indication that much greater attention to the environmental footprint of the gaming sector is needed going forward.”

Energy consumption is, of course, only one part of the overall environmental impact of a piece of technology. As Greenpeace’s own Guide to Greener Electronics states: “Upwards of 70 to 80% of the carbon footprint during the lifespan of personal computing devices occurs during manufacturing”. If, therefore, fewer gaming PCs, laptops and consoles are being manufactured and shipped thousands of miles around the world because consumers are running cloud services on existing equipment, that’s an unquestionable environmental benefit.

However, those vast data centres also need feeding with new servers, graphics chips, cooling equipment and so forth. As the interest in cloud gaming and DaaS expands, so will those data centres.

The fact that Microsoft, VMware, Shadow and IBM all failed to respond to our questions about the environmental impact of their cloud services should at least give consumers pause for thought.

Electronics retailers must take back old kit for recycling

It’s been a while since we’ve written about the WEEE regulations, but one common misperception about the WEEE Directive is that electronics producers and retailers have a duty to take back and recycle your old equipment. They don’t, at least not directly. And despite the WEEE Directive being in place for more than a decade now, the recycling of electrical waste is still falling well short of targets.

Electronics producers and retailers who put more than five tons of electrical goods on the market each year must join a producer compliance scheme (PCS). As the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) website explains: “The PCS takes on your obligations to finance the collection, treatment, recovery and environmentally sound disposal of household WEEE collected in the UK”. In other words, retailers pay the recycling firms and they take care of business. At least, in theory.

Let’s take Amazon, for example. At the time of writing, Amazon’s WEEE recycling page stated that it has decided to fulfil its recycling obligations by joining a government-approved takeback scheme operated by a company called Valpak. “As part of this scheme we ask that you take your old piece of equipment to a designated collection facility (DCF) run by Valpak in your area”.

That’s actually a little misleading. Amazon customers don’t have to go to Valpak-run facilities – they can drop off their unwanted electrical goods at any of 1,100 collection points run by local authorities across the country. “For clarification, Valpak itself does not run any DCFs [designated collection facilities] and we have brought this to the attention of Amazon to change their wording on this point,” said Duncan Simpson, director of Scottish business development and relations at Valpak.

Who pays for the electric waste at these public sites to be recycled? The companies do, based on how much electrical equipment they sell into the market each year. Initially, the majority of producer compliance schemes ganged together to organise collections and share the costs of collecting electrical waste from remote sites, but some of the compliance schemes refused to join. Now that’s been made mandatory by the government, so there should no longer be some hard-to-reach local authority sites sitting on piles of electrical equipment that nobody wants to collect.

That might help the government reach its WEEE recycling targets, because it’s not done a great job of hitting targets so far. In 2018, the UK collected just shy of 493,000 tons of household WEEE – only 91.7% of the target. The target was missed by 100,000 tons in 2017. The target for this year has been increased to 550,577 tons, so that the UK can meet European targets, although there seems to be precious little extra money going into WEEE recycling and widespread reports of online retailers dodging their obligation to join compliance schemes.

Valpak’s Duncan Simpson told us the UK’s entire WEEE system is up for review in 2020, in which he expects the government to put a greater emphasis on reminding us to send our electrical waste to collection points and not leave it to rot in cupboards, garages or landfill. If and when the UK leaves the EU, however, the entire scheme could be called into question.

You need to leave a computer on to access it remotely

If you’re one of those people who is constantly remote desktoping (yes, we’re using it as a verb, live with it) into the office to get files to work on at home, you’ll probably leave that office PC running – after all, it’s not you paying the electricity bills. Even if you are paying the bills, you might leave a computer running at home so you can access it at work. But neither of these options are helping to prevent glaciers turning to mush. Is having to leave a PC running to access it remotely another myth we can bust?

Well, sort of. There’s no doubt wake-on-LAN has improved, but it’s not as simple as you might like. It needs to be enabled in BIOS, assuming the system even supports it in the first place, and even then there’s a fair few hurdles to overcome before you can fire up your work PC from home.

First, if your PC is not connected to the network via an Ethernet port, you will need to go into the Windows Device Manager, find your wireless network card, click Properties and check if it has the option to Wake on Magic Packet. That feature is a lot less exciting than it sounds – it’s simply a means for the wireless card to listen out for a broadcast packet on a certain IP address to tell it to rouse from sleep.

Even if your card does support this feature, there are all sorts of firewall, port forwarding and other challenges that must be overcome. You will certainly want to engage the support of your in-house IT team if you’re planning to remotely access an office PC, and you may well need to do some router configuration at home if you’re planning to wake a PC there.

The question today is whether remote desktoping is the right way to crack this particular nut. Cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are much easier ways of moving/sharing files between work and off-site devices, although they potentially come with the same energy-consumption caveats as the cloud gaming services.

If you’re trying to access files from home, a NAS drive – which is likely to consume much less energy (typically around 30W) when on than a desktop PC – is more environmentally friendly and easier to manage than that remote desktop/wake-on-LAN.

Leaving a computer running around the clock may be convenient, but it’s not really necessary now.

More than 1,100 Google employees have signed a public letter addressed to Ruth Porat demanding that the CFO and other company executives formulate a decisive climate plan for the coming decade.

Sam Kern, a cloud engineer at Google told Motherboard: "I can't feel good about my job knowing that the profits I help generate and the technology I help build furthers an extractive economy that displaces its harmful effects onto vulnerable communities."

The opening statement reads: "We, the undersigned Google workers, in accordance with the gravity and urgency of the global climate crisis and its disproportionate harm to marginalized people, call on Google to commit to and release a company-wide climate plan."

The letter outlines four specific, demanding that the company: eliminate its carbon footprint by 2030; hold no contracts that "enable or accelerate" fossil fuel extraction; cut all funding for think tanks, lobbyists, and politicians which deny or delay climate legislation; and withhold all support for "entities enabling the incarceration, surveillance, displacement, or oppression of refugees or frontline communities".

The letter was likely influenced by the 1,800 Amazon employees who made identical demands (apart from the Google letter's fourth point) and staged a walkout on 20 September during the global climate strike. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pledged thereafter to cut Amazon's carbon footprint by 2040, a promise workers criticised as not going far enough.

"I've been inspired by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and Amazon workers were inspired by Google workers' walkout over Google's mistreatment of sexual harassment cases," said climate change activist and senior technical writer at Google's Mountain View headquarters Sharon Campbell-Crow. "Every worker-led action helps build the momentum."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced just before the climate strikes that the company would make "the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history".

"We've been a carbon-neutral company since 2007," he said, meaning that since then, the company has purchased enough renewable energy to match their electricity consumption. That's pretty good, but Google's employees think they can do better -- much better -- by eliminating their carbon emissions in the first place.

Employees are also demanding that Google reevaluate which politicians they fund. Last year, the tech giant gave its financial support to 111 congressmen who vote against climate change legislaion more than 90 percent of the time.

While they're at it, employees are protesting Google's involvement with entities oppressing "refugees or frontline communities", which includes supplying cloud tech to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the US-Mexico border. Roughly 1,500 employees signed a petition against Google's ties to ICE and other border agencies in August.

It is still unclear as to how Google will respond to these demands. IT Pro's request for comment was not answered at the time of publication.

I've just scored the very definition of a pyrrhic victory. Our 16-month-old fridge-freezer packed up over the weekend.

The light came on, but the milk was about as cold as John Prescott's armpits (please don't let him be dead by the time you read this). The ice cream was merely cream. The Hotpoint was living up to its name.

Of course, the fridge only came with a one-year warranty. These days, it doesn't matter if you're spending six grand on a Mac Pro or a few hundred quid on a freezer - almost everything comes with a mere one-year warranty. That's not necessarily because they don't think it will see its second birthday (although we'll come to that), but more because there's a lucrative business in extended warranties to bump up the profit margins. And people are stupid enough to buy them.

But if you know your consumer law and are prepared to stand your ground, there's really no need for those expensive after-care packages. European legislation states that you have up to six years to claim for faults on new or even second-hand products.

Manufacturers will kick, scream and deny that this guarantee exists, but most will eventually break when you threaten to take them to court.

The long slog to assert your consumer rights starts with the call centre, of course: ao.com, which sold us our fridge, has an ingenious call system that boots you straight to the manufacturer of your product if it's older than a year. Hotpoint wanted to charge me for a repair, so I then spent the next 30 minutes cracking AO's phone system, working out exactly which combination of numbers you must press to reach an actual human being.

Then we begin the auction. AO starts by offering me a 150 after-care warranty to send out a repairman, but that's half the cost of the fridge. I'll see you in court. Okay, fine, it relents, get a repairman to fix it and we'll cover the cost.

The repair bloke turns up, opens the fridge and embarks on a nervous breakdown in my kitchen. "Fridges like this will be the death of people like me," he bemoans. "You can't repair 'em - all the components are moulded into the lining. I can't access 'em."

I get the poor fella to scribble this on a piece of tear-sodden paper, before shuffling him out of my kitchen and pressing the number of the local Samaritans into his palm.

Hi ho, hi ho, back to AO we go.

The repair bloke says that it's unrepairable - I'll have a new fridge, please. Ah, we can repair it, says AO. We'll send out a Hotpoint specialist and split the cost with you.

Erm, no. Ah, go on. No. Go on. No. Go on. I'll see you in court. Hang on, I'll speak to my manager. Okay, you'll have a new fridge by Thursday, we'll come and pick the old one up. Deal? Deal. (The sequence of events may appear quicker in this paragraph than they did in real life.)

Despite all the wasted hours, I came off that phone call feeling pretty pleased with myself. I went in with a busted out-of-warranty fridge and came out with a brand new one - a different model to the faulty one, too. But, and this could well be the title of my autobiography, it didn't take long for the happiness to subside.

First, you don't need me to harp on about global warming, landfill, waste plastic and so on to know we are massively in the brown stuff. Yet, here's a 16-month old fridge freezer, that stands taller than I am, on its way to the tip either because it's designed to be unrepairable, or because it was cheaper and less hassle for AO to replace it than to bother with the repair. What a ridiculous waste. I would have been quite happy to have it repaired, there's a soon-to-be-redundant man in my neighbourhood with the skills to repair it, and yet the manufacturer and retailer would rather dump an almost new fridge and its noxious gases instead of letting him perform a simple fix.

And, of course, it's not only white goods manufacturers that are doing this. We're all too familiar with components glued to motherboards, laptops ruined when the keyboard breaks, sealed smartphones, printer heads that can't be cleaned, super-sized screens that are binned as soon as a pixel dies. The waste is enormous and it's at epidemic levels in the electronics industry. It has to stop now.

You may have seen recent news on the chancellor's proposed "digital tax" and how difficult it will be to implement. Can I suggest a simpler alternative? If you sell a piece of electronic hardware that can't be repaired, the VAT rate on your product should be increased to 100%.

There is no good way of disposing of all this electronic waste. We need to dispose of the notion that replace-rather-than-repair is acceptable.

The nature of how we generate energy in the UK has changed dramatically over the last few years. Renewables now make up nearly 30% of all electricity generated in the UK according to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

But that's not the whole story. We live in a newly emerging world of microgeneration and microgrids, where local energy economies are starting to flourish.

Business as buyer and maker

Microgrids are discrete energy setups capable of generating and storing energy either as an isolated system or in parallel with a national grid. Essentially, microgrids can provide a means for dedicated power supplies that are designed to be protected from issues of high demand that may plague the wider energy network. They're also usually situated far closer to their primary consumer, which drastically reduces the cost and complexity of energy transfer.

This emerging economy is something that business can tap into, with contributions to a local energy grid increasingly forming part of a company's income generation.

Dr Matt Wood, energy innovation manager at Bioregional, a company that supports regional and local energy economies, tells us that organisations have started leasing their roof space or excess land to support the growth of energy generation, whether that's through another company setting up a local grid or as part of community initiatives.

"They will then purchase the energy from the generator," explains Wood. "This is usually called a 'private wire', and is the simplest form of local energy grid."

"Unlike home energy bills, businesses are usually billed on a half-hourly basis, and the price changes through the day," he adds. "By avoiding the high-cost periods (using batteries or renewable generation) costs can be reduced. Renewable energy usually has fixed costs as well, so a company can mitigate against future electricity price rises by signing long-term contracts with generators."

Cost factors

In 2016, a National Infrastructure Commission report entitled 'Smart Power' argued the case for microgeneration and local grids, which it claimed could help save customers up to 8 billion per year by 2030. It also suggested that these efforts would ensure the UK met its 2050 carbon targets.

Since then much has changed both in terms of the cost of entry to local energy generation and the technologies available to those wanting to use such energy. Mike Wilks, head of UK energy networks at Capgemini told us that since that report we have seen "the continued improvement in commercial viability of small-scale energy storage/batteries and the proliferation of digital/IOT based solutions", something which has been essential to ensuring effective real-time operation of microgrids.

Dr Matt Wood thinks businesses are more open to these kinds of ideas these days. "Businesses like Kingfisher, M&S, Sainsbury's etc. have direct experience installing and maintaining these systems, as well as the legal and contractual issues around them, so the leap to a local energy grid is not as big as it would have been five to ten years ago."

While interest in microgrids is still largely confined to the largest organisations, and has yet to spark among business more widely, we're almost certainly going to see broad adoption go up as traditional energy costs inflate.

Mike Wilks argues that "deployment of microgrids remains wrongly perceived as a complex and expensive initiative", and that "awareness of the potential benefits from active participation within the energy system is limited".

"The key to driving increased uptake in this area will thus be a combination of continued energy price rises and increased awareness of the potential provided by local grids to enable businesses not only to reduce their energy costs but indeed to be able to earn revenue from provision of energy specific and other services to the energy system beyond their direct needs."

Taking the long-term view

In some respects, we have a chicken and egg situation here. The more businesses that install and use smart energy systems both as generator and customer the more supply there will be, and economies of scale mean that equipment, installation and maintenance costs fall.

However, we're still heavily reliant on non-renewable energy. "Businesses currently all need natural resources, it's impossible to move away from that principle," explains George Adams, director of energy & engineering at SPIE UK. "We currently use 50 to 60% more than nature can replace. No resources means no business. This is a critical area for R&D, Government policy and Corporate Social Responsibility."

Adams argues that in order for businesses to be viable in the future, they need to help create a future to be viable in.

"If businesses want to be sustainable in the long term, then the issues of climate change must be included in their economic analysis," he explains. "The benefits are whole life, social and business. As we progress to cities taking the lead on sustainability and efficiency, it makes sense to create localised energy solutions that are flexible and more efficient."

Google has announced it's achieved its goal of running all of its clouds on renewable energy - a mission it set out to complete just over a year ago.

In fact, the company has generated more green energy than it needs to power its data centres and offices from renewable sources including solar and wind power.

"Over the course of 2017, across the globe, for every kilowatt hour of electricity we consumed, we purchased a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from a wind or solar farm that was built specifically for Google," Urs Hlzle, Google's senior vice president of Technical Infrastructure said in a blog post. "This makes us the first public Cloud, and company of our size, to have achieved this feat."

Hlzle went on to explain the company is taking its responsibilities even further, entering into contracts to buy a further three gigawatts of power from renewable sources.

Not only does its investment in green energy sources mean it's making a conscious effort to reduce its carbon footprint significantly, it's also financing the green energy economy, with current contracts contributing more than $3 billion in new capital investment around the world.

However, there's still some way to go until Google is 100% run on renewable energy sources.

Although Hlzle explained the company adds a kilowatt hour of energy to the grid for every hour it spends, that may not be used to directly power its own data centres or offices, because the projects it supports may be in different geographical areas to its facilities or the power generated at a different time.

"What's important to us is that we are adding new clean energy sources to the electrical system, and that we're buying that renewable energy in the same amount as what we're consuming, globally and on an annual basis," he said.

The company explained it will continue to invest in new energy sources as demand for its products grow. It will also stay on the lookout for new opportunities to help markets where it's not currently operating renewable energy sources.

"This program has always been a first step for us, but it is an important milestone in our race to a carbon-free future," Hlzle finished. "We do want to get to a point where renewables and other carbon-free energy sources actually power our operations every hour of every day. It will take a combination of technology, policy and new deal structures to get there, but we're excited for the challenge. We can't wait to get back to work."

Image: Google's Eemshaven data centre, The Netherlands, courtesy of Google

The issue of plastic waste has never been as prominent in the public consciousness. Warnings made by Sir David Attenborough in the final episode of Blue Planet II have been followed by commitments from the UK government and the European Union (EU) and the subject has been raised at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

According to the UN-affiliated StEP programme, the amount of e-waste worldwide is increasing at an annual rate of 5-10%, and the volume is projected to reach 65 million tonnes a year.

Meanwhile, 25.8 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated in Europe each year across all sectors of which just 30% is collected for recycling. Some of this leaves the EU's oversight and much of it ends up in the ocean, as Blue Planet II can testify.

Legally binding pledges are still absent, but Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to eradicate all avoidable plastic waste in the UK by 2042, while the European Union (EU) hopes to make all packaging reusable by 2030.

How great is tech's role?

Clearly, these measures are more geared towards consumables like coffee cups, but this doesn't mean the technology sector can ignore the discussion.

This is a view expressed by Greenpeace, whose annual Guide to Greener Electronics analyses the world's biggest tech firms and gives them letter grades based on their attitudes towards renewable energy, sustainable manufacturing, and other practices, such as the ease at which equipment can be repaired or recycled.

In recent years, the report has placed greater significance on reusable materials that minimise the need to mine for more commodities, consume more energy and create more waste. Indeed, it wants action to back up the progressive, environmentally-conscious image that many tech firms project.

"Now is the time for the tech sector to channel its expertise into reinventing the way that electronic devices are made and used in society, creating a circular and renewably powered business model that other sectors can follow," says Greenpeace.

Planned obsolescence

Among its chief concerns is that vendors are deliberately shortening the lifespan of their products by making them difficult to repair or modify in a bid to encourage consumers to upgrade more frequently. This, of course, increases the frequency at which they're discarded, and therefore the likelihood that this will be done irresponsibility. And this is before we consider the additional resources being used in the manufacturing and delivery processes.

"The amount of e-waste generated globally continues to see significant growth, already 50-60 million metric tons each year and still rising due in great part to the shorter replacement cycles in IT equipment," Gary Cook, IT Campaigner for Greenpeace, tells IT Pro.

"Too many devices, smartphones in particular, are designed that make even battery replacement, screen replacement, and upgrading of storage increasingly difficult if not impossible."

Greenpeace estimates that just 16% of e-waste is recycled responsibly and that although some progress has been made with plastic, the same can't be said of metals. By closing the loop' on both plastic and metals, manufacturers will be able to recycle more from old products and reduce the amount of waste.

A number of companies have committed closing the loop with plastic, most notably Dell, but several have not fulfilled pledges to eliminate PVC and BFRs (Brominated Flame Retardants) from their products. Only Apple and Google have done so to date.

"The average computer requires an astonishing 22kg of synthetic chemical compounds during production, but that's not nearly the end," Christina Valimaki, head of research and segment markets at analyst firm Elsevier, tells IT Pro.

Many of the components in tech products are toxic, such as the lead and cadmium in most modern monitors and mercury in screen-lighting lamps, parts that aren't always disposed of properly.

"Tech firms must break the product lifecycle down into distinct stages to identify where toxic materials are used and where plastic waste is produced, and either change the manufacturing processes or substitute with greener' materials," adds Valimaki.

Finite resources

Regulation, of course, plays a role. A revised EU Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment directive, set to come into effect in 2019, will require member states to recycle or collect 65% of all equipment sold or 85% of all wasted electronics.

But activists want an entire mindset change within the IT industry - the creation of products that are easier to repair and upgrade. Apple, in particular, has been criticised for making it a challenge to replace screens or batteries that are damaged or ageing.

"There are certainly opportunities to reduce the amount of waste generated in the manufacturing of the products and components, as well as in the amount of packaging, and we have begun to see some leadership on both of these fronts by some companies," adds Cook.

Following the recall of the Galaxy Note 7 last year, Samsung revealed it would collect 157 metric tons of metals and refurbish some models. Dell has also been noted for its attempts to use recyclable packaging, using materials such as bamboo and wheat straw for its products, and wants to use 100% biodegradable or recycled materials by 2020.

And in 2013, mobile operator O2 started to ditch the wall charger from some smartphones, only providing a Micro-USB cable, as there are already hundreds of millions of unused chargers in the UK from previous devices.

Keep calm and go green

Environmentally conscious organisations should only be selecting those suppliers that are committed to reducing waste and choose products that are easy to repair.

Greenpeace's rating system only applies to the 17 largest electronics manufacturers in the world, but it's a useful starting point, and for individual products there are certification programmes. Most notably there's the Green Electronics Council's gold, silver and bronze EPEAT certifications that are awarded for meeting certain standards on design, toxic materials, lifespan and packaging.

"Corporate IT departments have an important role in reducing IT waste," says Cook, "by selecting those brands and products who demonstrate both solid product design and a commitment to providing product repair information."

Force for good

Organisations have a responsibility to ensure they have an adequate recycling policy in place, which includes using suppliers that will take back older products.

"Aside from mobile devices, businesses also amass a huge amount of other unused IT equipment such as PCs, laptops, servers, networking equipment, etc. It is vital these are disposed of properly from an environmental and data perspective," Keir McConomy, founder and CEO of phone repair firm iMend, tells IT Pro. "Businesses can even earn money for their old stock."

The technology industry has long positioned itself as a progressive, liberal force with greater morals than other sectors. And this can be seen in the advent of green tech' firms looking to solve environmental problems such as pollution and waste.

But as awareness of plastic and e-waste continues, and as tech infiltrates our lives in more areas, manufacturers and must be prepared to take even greater responsibility for the effect their devices have on the environment.

Image: Shutterstock