Carbon emissions of data usage increasing, but what is yours?

Companies are increasingly using cloud (hosting) services facilitated by external data centres to store their company data, and to run their websites and shops. The amount of electricity needed to run these data centres is enormous; with the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from data centres exceeding the emissions from flying. And due to Covid-19, with more online meetings and more web shop use, this is even further enhanced. In most western countries the internet traffic has increased by 20%, with small actions such as simply turning off your camera during virtual meetings being a good idea, an environmental study says.

Worldwide, it is estimated that data centers consume about 3 percent of the global electric supply and account for about 2 percent of total GHG emissions. That’s about the same as the entire airline industry. The alarming news is that this figure will increase to 5-7% of the global emissions, as has been seen during the pandemic. Data centers, will therefore, play a key role in reducing GHG emissions, as the need increases for them to turn to clean energy sources and dramatically improve energy efficiency.

Taking responsibility for your impact

We see our clients wanting to take increasing responsibility for their climate impact for the services of their data storage providers.  So, we have started to investigate the climate impact, qith our current estimates of data centre carbon usage averaging 36 g CO2eq per MB. However, we come across a lack of information-sharing by data centres and storage providers, alongside a myriad of other information sources and different interpretations.