A look at companies with large data centers that are adopting green sustainability standards for production and energy consumption, utilizing a level of renewables to offset fossil fuels.

Data centers, computers, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and the internet provide an effortless experience for those who use them daily. The only aspect that matters is how fast they can perform their various functions, and speed is the name of the game with each new device that hits the market. Consumers rely on new technology to Tweet, chat with friends, stream video, take pictures, work, upload data to Cloud services, and more. Most consumers are also climate-conscious and support companies that have adopted green sustainability standards for production and energy consumption, utilizing a level of renewables to offset fossil fuels.

(Image source: Brett Sayless via Pixabay)

Considering data centers, computers, servers, and mobile device production consume a tremendous amount of power for data throughput, storage, and cooling; it begs the question: are tech companies “going green” as a public relations endeavor, or is the industry capable of offsetting costs using renewable energy? To answer that question, we need to look at the technology industry’s overall energy consumption trends. According to a 2020 report from Energy Innovation, servers and their cooling systems draw the most energy, followed by storage drives and network devices. Some of the largest data centers in the world are packed with tens of thousands of IT devices, which can consume more than 100 megawatts (MW) of electricity or enough to power roughly 80,000 U.S. households. As the number of internet users continues to grow, the demand for increased throughput and storage will also rise, and so will the power demand.

Schematic of a modeling approach to show estimated data center and storage energy use. (Image source: Lawrence Berkeley National Labs)

Official statistics on data center energy use on a national and global level are not currently compiled; thus, mathematical models are used to create estimates. These include “bottom-up” models, which calculate energy use based on stocks of IT devices in data centers and their energy consumption characteristics. This type of model is data-intensive and time-consuming, meaning they only appear every few years. Another method of calculating energy uses “extrapolation” models, which take the data from bottom-up calculations and scales them up based on indicators such as market growth and global IP traffic, as well as several other metrics.

10/17-19 EAC