Data centres are mushrooming all over the world as the digital economy takes off. Can we build them as green as they can be?
Along the northwestern coast of England, some 380km away from London, lies the perpetually windy seaside town of Blackpool. Popular among locals as a quick weekend getaway destination, Blackpool is known for being wet, cold and bleak, especially during winter. It is precisely these natural conditions that make it the perfect place to house wind farms — a source of unlimited renewable energy. Of late, Blackpool’s geographical position along the Irish Sea has led to another advantageous development — it joined the North Atlantic loop, a subsea fibre cable system providing high-capacity network connection from the US to Northern Europe. With access to renewable energy and super-fast global Internet connection, Blackpool suddenly found itself on the map as a world leader in ethically powered data, making it a highly sought-after location for building data centres. In late 2021, one of the world’s largest data centre operators, Equinix, announced plans to build a new international business exchange (IBX) data centre in Salford, Manchester, just an hour’s car ride away from Blackpool. Worth GBP61 million ($101.99 million), MA5 is Equinix’s fifth data centre in Manchester. “It is home to low-latency connectivity through network routes to the US and has access to international subsea cables via Ireland and the west of England,” the company said in a press release on Oct 27, 2021. Blackpool’s proximity enables the design-build of MA5 to be sustainable, putting Equinix’s data centre on track to achieving its goal of using 100% clean and renewable energy and attaining green certifications, including the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Increasingly, data centre operators worldwide have been working to “green” their business. Most have proudly announced their sustainability goals of running on 100% renewable energy by 2030 and reducing their power usage effectiveness (PUE) score — a metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data centre — to under 1.3. An ideal PUE ratio is 1.0, which signifies that every unit of power is utilised solely by the IT equipment. Like Equinix, other data centre operators have begun eyeing Blackpool and other cities as strategic locations for building their facilities. Lunar Digital and Kao Data are some that have announced expansion plans in nearby Manchester this year alone, all in the hopes of gaining access to clean energy and minimising latency (or delay in the transmission of data) in operations — and it is no wonder why. When the world began to digitise, data centres also began to develop a bad reputation for being “energy guzzlers” and a bane to their immediate environment. For instance, it was recorded that the global data centre storage capacity in 2021 stood at 1,327 exabytes (EB). One EB is equivalent to one billion gigabytes (GB). From the first data centre built during the 1940s to the dotcom boom followed by the pandemic which fuelled the growth of the global data centre market, the industry today is projected to reach EUR235 billion ($338.5 billion) by 2026 with a CAGR of 4.5% and shows no signs of slowing. The carbon footprint of a data centre is made up of three parts; electricity consumption to run the servers, water consumption to cool the servers, and the lifetime of the equipment, which affects how often each part needs replacement. On average, data centres each year consume an estimated 196 to 400 terawatt-hours (TWh), equivalent to 1% to 2% of the world’s global energy consumption, and just a one-megawatt (MW) data centre using traditional cooling systems consumes about 25.5 million litres of water. Experts estimate that data centre activity accounts for 2.5% to 3.7% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding emissions from commercial flights (about 2.4%) and other essential activities that fuel our global economy. According to the Paris-based non-profit organisation The Shift Project, emissions generated from watching 30 minutes of Netflix are about 1.6 kg of CO2, the equivalent of driving almost 6km in your car. It is no wonder that opposition to data centre development is growing. In March, farmers in the Netherlands objected to the building of a data centre by Microsoft in the wake of a nitrogen crisis, fearing that it could be worsened by its construction and operation. In July, a plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day sparked anger in Uruguay, which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years. But data centres are the backbone of today’s digital economy. They are critical for the storing, processing, and distributing of an organisation’s most critical and proprietary assets. The infrastructure houses data for the Internet, the banking industry, telecommunications and governments holding critical data of citizens.
