We often hear the word “sustainability” paired with “digitalization.” Indeed, digital technology in many cases provides solutions to modernize and make entire sectors more sustainable and eco-friendly. But is the digital sector itself environmentally sustainable? Not quite. That’s why we need Green Cloud Computing.
It’s a paradoxical phenomenon that experts call the “Jevons paradox,” named after the economist who studied market efficiencies and how they scale. When a technology becomes very efficient, it spreads exponentially, ultimately becoming more polluting than the technologies it replaced.
Thus, the digital transformation process of entire economic sectors and the spread of Cloud Computing raise serious sustainability concerns. Energy consumption driven by the Cloud, and more broadly by the Internet, is constantly growing and could soon become one of the main sources of CO2.
To put it more concretely, if we don’t find ways to increase data center efficiency, the sector could end up using up to 20% of all electricity consumed — becoming responsible for 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025.
What Is Green Cloud Computing?
Green Cloud is the answer to this problem. It encompasses all the strategies that Cloud service providers implement to achieve efficiency targets. These targets are imposed by regulations (the European Union plays a central role here, as we’ll see shortly) and demanded by customers. Indeed, companies that use Cloud Computing services are also exerting increasing pressure to achieve greater efficiencies and meet the demands of their stakeholders.
The Scale of the Problem
The fact that data centers have a significant environmental impact has been known for years. What is surprising is the speed at which this impact is constantly growing.
The 2020 report issued by the European Commission reveals some interesting (and in some ways alarming) figures — let’s take a look.
- In 2018, the energy consumption of data centers in European Union countries amounted to 76.8 TeraWatt-hours, of which just over half was for Cloud Computing centers. The estimate is that by 2030 it could grow by 28%, reaching 98.52 TWh, with an even larger share going to Cloud service providers.
- EU computing centers in 2018 accounted for 2.7% of total electricity demand. If they maintain the same trajectory, they will reach 3.21% by 2030.
- Adding to the energy demand is the growth of edge computing, driven by the spread of digitalization and the associated need to acquire, transfer, and process ever-increasing amounts of data. In 2018, edge data centers accounted for 2% of the energy used by all computing centers. This share is expected to rise to 12% by 2025 according to estimates.
- Data centers have grown sixteenfold in less than ten years (currently numbering eight million), and their energy consumption doubles every year. Greenpeace estimated as early as 2017 that 7% of the world’s energy needs were consumed by data centers.
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The European Union and Green Cloud
The European Union — which aims for “climate neutrality” by 2050 — is perhaps the geopolitical area most aware of the environmental risks posed by the Cloud and the Internet in general.
To address the problem, the European Commission promotes the development of technologies and strategies to reduce Cloud Computing energy consumption. The ultimate goal is the creation of an eco-friendly Cloud market.
The Commission’s approach includes a mix of regulatory tools, some already existing and some new. The objective is to improve energy efficiency and circular economy performance in the Information Technology sector, defining the terms and methodologies for reducing consumption.
Among the existing regulations are the ecodesign regulation for servers and data storage products, the European Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency, and finally the “green” procurement criteria for European public entities regarding computing centers, server rooms, and Cloud services.
Furthermore, the Commission is studying a proposal for an Energy Efficiency Directive (which should increase data center efficiency and sustainability through constant monitoring). There is also the Regulation on the taxonomy of sustainable investments (already approved in 2021). Additionally, there are several funding programs, including Horizon Europe, Connecting Europe Facility 2, the Digital Europe program, InvestEU, and the Recovery and Resilience Facility — the latter also addressing innovation and cybersecurity topics.
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Finally, the Commission is working to create a set of universally accepted criteria, methodologies, and definitions for assessing data center energy efficiency, climate neutrality, and overall sustainability.
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How Green Cloud Computing Works
What is a green data center in practice?
Energy efficiency touches on various aspects of these increasingly complex and sophisticated environments. A Green Cloud Computing center uses multiple complementary strategies to improve its environmental impact. Let’s look at the main ones.
RENEWABLE ENERGY
First of all, the energy supply must be renewable. For example, through supply contracts with providers that use solar or wind energy. Or at least through the purchase of energy credits that allow obtaining certifications for 100% renewable energy use.
COOLING EFFICIENCY
The environment where the data center is located must be renovated or designed from scratch to be more efficient. In particular, regarding cooling, which is the part that consumes approximately 50% of the energy required by the data center.
A widespread approach is to move computing centers to Northern Europe, to areas with a colder climate. Alternatively, underground or even underwater, in sealed containers that allow heat exchange with the surrounding environment. In other cases, ingenious heat dissipation systems are used to heat surrounding buildings, or artificial intelligence is employed to optimize cooling systems.
LOW-POWER DEVICES AND STRATEGIES
Both software and hardware play an important role: processors, memory, and network equipment must be low-power. Another strategy is the use of virtualization and software-defined infrastructure (SDI) architectures to consolidate multiple less efficient servers into fewer, larger, and more efficient computing cores and storage systems.
SOFTWARE OPTIMIZATION
Finally, software optimization strategies must be implemented. This is done, for example, by improving workflows, cache management, internal data center network traffic, and optimizing data storage. But these are just examples — there are many strategies that can be deployed to reduce the consumption of servers, network equipment, and storage units.
Big Tech Solutions for the Green Cloud
Many industry associations have been established to find energy efficiency solutions with the goal of minimizing environmental impact. One example is the Green Storage Initiative, focused on data storage equipment.
The major players, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, have created strategies and tools to showcase their “green side.” One example is AWS’s Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. It allows customers to track, measure, and even predict the emissions generated by their use of AWS Cloud resources.
Microsoft, for its part, has created an Emissions Impact Dashboard. It calculates the material impact of using computing resources across the entire technology supply chain: from materials used in manufacturing digital equipment to their transportation and logistics, usage, consumption, end of life, and disposal.
In both cases, what the tech giants have sought to do is make environmental impact information about their Cloud Computing resources measurable. This allows their customers to include the data in their sustainability reports and set future Green Cloud Computing targets.
Google Cloud goes even further, thanks to a map of available computing resources with icons representing which ones have the lowest impact. According to Google, in half of cases users choose to move workloads to nodes with a lower impact. Google also provides a very broad set of fine-grained metrics across its entire Cloud infrastructure to supply the data needed for reporting.
Finally, Google has created an automated tool that uses machine learning to identify code running on a Google server that might be unused or abandoned. Unused code and applications represent a significant share of extra carbon emissions. They can be easily eliminated once customers become aware of their existence.
The Role of Open Source
Open source is much more than just a software development methodology. It is a set of principles (transparency, collaboration, frequent releases, inclusive meritocracy, and a sense of community) that can play a very important role in Green Computing.
The first reason comes from Steven Chu, the current United States Secretary of Energy. According to Chu, using open source software helps reduce global warming because it accelerates a fundamental component: global cooperation. Without having to negotiate intellectual property rights and create alternative new standards, cooperative development and integration of solutions at a global scale becomes much faster and easier. One example is open standards, which enable the integration and control of countless industrial products, are energy efficient, and reduce emissions.
Therefore, open source is also an example for rethinking the way industries work. Collaboration and sustainable technology allow us to consider the use of Cloud Computing as a valuable resource to be managed in an open and inclusive way.
Moreover, the growing adoption of open source software in the business and industrial world is accompanied by a constant effort by foundations such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to establish guidelines for the development of ecologically sustainable software and infrastructure.
Ultimately, rethinking technology and especially IT can help reduce environmental impact, and the role of open source in all of this is central.
In Summary
To conclude, today digitalization and Cloud Computing undeniably represent an opportunity for organizations (and in some cases, the only viable path to evolve and continue to exist). However, it is important to maintain a high level of awareness about the less obvious implications of Cloud Computing, such as its environmental impact.
As we have seen, on the path toward Green Cloud Computing, organizations also play a role. For example, they can contribute to reducing energy consumption through the choice of open source software, the optimization and modernization of their applications, and through the efficient and responsible use of Cloud services.
