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Data Centers: Climate Change Call to Action
The US Data Center construction market is growing. It’s being driven by increased demand for things like video streaming, IoT, and the availability of 5G networks. A report by analyst firm Arizton estimates that the new US data center construction market will grow 3.5 percent annually through 2027. The world currently has more than 8 million data centers.
But one roadblock to data center growth is climate change. Major cloud vendors, like Google and Oracle, have already been hit with outages due to cooling failures during periods of hot weather. In fact, forty-five percent of US data centers have been hit with bouts of extreme weather that have affected operations.
While on the one hand, climate change is adversely affecting data center operations, on other hand, data centers are also implicated in aggravating the climate crisis.
There is an environmental impact from data centers using massive amounts of electricity. Ray Walsh, a digital privacy consultant, added that “coolants are often made of hazardous chemicals, and battery backups at data centers – needed for when there are power shortages – cause an environmental impact both due to mining for battery components and the disposal of the toxic batteries afterward. Server centers often also burn diesel fuel to keep up with power demands.”
Paul Barford, professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told InformationWeek that “unfortunately, climate change-related problems aren’t going away anytime soon — and the risks to data centers and critical networking infrastructure will continue to grow. The most important thing is that we need to act immediately and urgently on both climate change and improving resilience. We cannot continually operate in a reactive mode that scrambles to fix problems. We cannot wait for things to reach a state of emergency.”
