From the NewScientist.com news service’s Catherine Brahic :
Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report.
Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.
“Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk,” says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. “But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not.”
The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.
The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.
Unknown cost
The group ran a survey of some of the largest businesses in the UK in an attempt to find out how aware the industry is of its carbon footprint.
The survey revealed that more than half of the IT professionals surveyed believed their environmental impact was “significant”, however:
• 86% of them do not know the carbon footprint of their activities
• two thirds of the departments they work for are not responsible for paying their own energy bills
• more than half do not even see those bills
The bottom line is that IT departments “are buying lots and lots of kit that they have to run and cool without knowing what the energy cost of that kit is”, says Restorick.
The survey also revealed that considerable amounts of electricity could be saved by more efficient data storage: 60% of the departments said they were using less than half their storage capacity and 37% said they are storing data indefinitely.
Restorick told New Scientist that simply increasing the efficiency of energy use and data storage could easily cut 30% of power use in businesses. “In theory, this could happen overnight,” he says.
