COP 26 brings the World's governments together in the UK in November to discuss the global environmental crisis, and how nations can reduce impacts on our environment. Serious climate commitments have been made at national levels, translated into national strategies and embedded in regional and smart city action plans.
The demand for data centres is booming. Data is ever more important to business and society, causing the technology to process and store it to expand massively every year. That growth has reached a level where data centres are becoming part of the national critical infrastructure for many countries. Therefore, data centres form one key backdrop to the COP26 discussions due to the amount of electricity that they consume globally. The generation of power to support these data centres creates emissions, including the direct carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Even their construction creates indirect emissions.
With such a critical role in both the business and public sectors, the environmental performance of data centres can also help regional and city authorities realise their climate strategies. Data centre operators have already taken steps to both set and deliver on environmental commitments. Power supply commitments by operators to use 100% renewable energy are becoming common, often under long-term power purchase agreements with suppliers who can access such generation sources. Such power purchase commitments can create investment into new renewable power supplies.
The options to access renewable or low environmental impact electricity supply for data centres are growing through innovation. Wind, solar and hydro have become a first port of call for renewable energy generation. Hydrogen and LNG are newer fuels for power generation that are becoming more closely linked to data centres. In the UK alone, we are seeing the concentrated energy demands of industrial hubs starting to attract these newer fuel supplies. Competitive renewable energy from new fuels in such industrial hubs may then attract new data centre developments.
Development of new data centres within industrial hubs can balance their traditional city and business parks locations. The data centre facilities themselves may have their own initiatives to reduce energy consumption. Low energy technologies combined with active power management are ever more important for impactful environmental performance. Even the major batteries that data centres rely on for high online availability can become a part of the power optimisation task. For example, those batteries could be managed in a way that supports the local grid operation, provided that doesn't impede their data centre availability. To further drive environmental performance and sustainability, some data centre operators have formed industry groups. Innovation from such groups could have a systemic change in the sustainable growth of the data centre sector.
Private and public data centre operators can confidently build environmental performance into their operational objectives. The continued growth in the sustainability of data centres has the further benefit of helping their customers achieve their own sustainability targets.
It is great to see operators making proactive moves, in the face of the present and ever-increasing threats to the world’s climate.