Digital data has an environmental cost. Calling it 'the cloud' conceals that, researcher says

Originally published in November 2022.

The breezy language used to describe our growing need for data processing — what we know as the "cloud" — doesn't reflect the urgency to re-evaluate the design of data centres in the midst of climate change, a researcher says.

Routine online activities like sharing photos to social media, uploading files to shared drives, or streaming TV shows produce a lot of digital data. And as that data production soars, so does the energy demand for storing and processing it. 

"I think even the metaphor of the cloud does certain work to eliminate or hide the material and environmental impacts of the cloud," Lauren Bridges, PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, told Spark host Nora Young.

"The cloud as a metaphor even suggests that it's kind of out there — it's immaterial, it's invisible, and we as users don't really need to think about it."

Bridges, a critical data studies researcher, looks at the many implications — energy and water consumption, land use changes, and e-waste — of the cloud, and any infrastructure related to the internet. She says the language around the cloud conceals the real cost of storing this data and creates an "illusion of infinite capacity," which has to be broken in order to build data facilities that are resilient to the changing climate.

According to research by Nathan Ensmenger, data centres are estimated to account for releasing approximately 159 million metric tonnes of carbon back into the atmosphere annually — roughly the same as the entirety of the aviation industry. "It's quite significant," Bridges said. 

The growth of data centres mirrors the growth of the internet.​​​​​- Chheng Lim, architect specializing in data centre design

A typical data centre is also estimated to use between three to five million gallons of fresh water for cooling daily, Venkatesh Uddameri, director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University, told NBC News.

Bridges's work focuses on local land-use politics in a region of northern Virginia known to industry insiders as Data Centre Alley, where there's been a lot of data centre development. But it's not the only area that's experienced a boom in recent years.

As the worldwide data centre industry grows, the scale and size of the facilities needed to store data processing equipment increases.

When Chicago-based architect Chheng Lim first joined the industry, she says data centres were small server spaces in commercial office buildings and ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 sq. feet of space. "Now we have entire data centre campuses. The buildings that I design are the size of four football fields," she told Spark.

Lim, an associate at Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects, says this shift isn't surprising.

The number of internet users has grown from less than one per cent of the world population in the early '90s to an estimated 60 per cent of users today, said Lim. The speed and frequency at which we want to consume data has also increased, she added.

"The growth of data centres mirrors the growth of the internet," said Lim.

Data centres vs. extreme weather 

Data centres are also vulnerable to the effects of a changing climate.

In the summer of 2022, the U.K. saw a cascade of heat waves knock out some of its data centres. Similarly, extreme heat caused one of Twitter's main data centres in California to go offline briefly in September.

"If you look at the data centre stock throughout Europe, a large amount of that stock is now in excess of 15 years old, and it was built under the prevailing standards of the day," Simon Harris, head of critical infrastructure at Business Critical Solutions, told Spark.

Harris and his team specialize in helping companies with legacy facilities in the U.K. and throughout Europe to decarbonize, expand and modernize them.

These facilities depend on their cooling systems to maintain normal operations, so part of the work of refitting these buildings requires adapting these systems to changes in the environment. 

Harris and Lim argue that immersion cooling is one of the most promising alternatives to existing water-intensive and costly cooling process. Immersion cooling involves submerging servers into a special, non-conductive fluid, which immediately removes the heat energy created.

"A lot of those technologies are still very much in their nascent phases. And there's a lot of other parties that need to come to the table in order for these technologies to be adopted at scale," said Lim.

In recent years, there have been attempts to build data centres in colder, northern climates — including parts of Quebec — and even sink them below the sea to minimize the effects of unpredictable weather events.

With the continuing growth in demand, Harris says there is a concern that the energy needed to power data centre facilities will outpace any of the progress made in sustainability. 

"We cannot escape the fact that certified green electricity is what is going to be needed to run these facilities in a zero-carbon sense going forward."

Written and produced by Samraweet Yohannes.