💻 Sustainable digital technologies
Minimising emissions through hardware utilisation, and load shifting.
In 2018, the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector was responsible for 3.7% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—about 1.5 times more than the airline industry, which contributed 2.5%.
In this edition of Seagnal, a newsletter at the intersection of technology and sustainability, we delve into exactly how ICT surpasses the aviation sector in emissions and explore emerging technologies that are reducing its environmental footprint.
What’s ICT’s impact?
It is hard to grasp the impact of pollution we do not see, yet every digital device we use daily contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. This includes not only the emissions from manufacturing the devices (known as embodied emissions) and those from the electricity they consume. Digital technologies also add less visible emissions from networking—data transmission via technologies like 4G and 5G—and from the computations carried out in data centers, such as algorithms curating your Instagram feed or generating a ChatGPT response
Energy consumption by sector, The Shift Project - Lean ICT (2019). Terminals (use) are the use of smartphones, laptops, TVs …
With the rise of AI and cryptocurrency technologies energy consumption of data centers is projected to increase faster than other ICT sectors, so we will focus on how cloud-based technologies can enhance energy efficiency and consequently reduce the carbon emissions associated with traditional data centers.
Greenifying data centers
The cloud is an innovation that allows companies to run code on shared machines owned by a cloud provider, instead of on their servers (called on-premise). This shift not only cuts costs but can also reduce emissions if strategies to maximise hardware utilisation and carbon-aware are used.
Just as a car uses almost the same amount of fuel carrying four passengers as it does one, a computer running at full capacity (100%) doesn’t consume significantly more energy than one operating at a quarter of its capacity (25%). Maximising hardware utilisation is easier in the cloud as resources can be dynamically allocated and scaled according to demand.
Green software foundation, green software practitioner.
Carbon awareness
The grid's energy mix, or where the energy comes from, changes hourly. When the grid uses more renewable energy, using the same amount of electricity will pollute less. The Green Software Foundation refers to this as "carbon awareness" captured perfectly by the motto:
“Do more when the electricity is cleaner and do less when the electricity is dirtier”.
Just as you might choose to run your washing machine at night to take advantage of lower electricity rates, you can apply the same principle to cloud computing. If you need to back up a database, schedule this task during periods when your data center is powered by a higher share of renewable sources.
Cloud computing has an advantage over your washing machine though: it isn't tied to a specific location. Most cloud tasks can be run anywhere in the world where there is a data center (Amazon has 100+ locations). This means you can process data or run simulations in regions with high renewable energy use, and then send the results back home—though not for all use cases.
The ability to shift spatially and temporally data center loads enables companies to maximise the use of clean energy.
Conclusion
To recap, we have seen that ICT, though invisible, is a bigger emitter than the entire aviation industry. We focused on technologies and principles to reduce data center loads, as it’s likely to grow the fastest, but also because the principles are universal (remember the washing machine and the car). We’ve seen that three pillars to reduce impacts are maximising utilisation, as well as spatial and temporal shifting based on carbon awareness.
While we focused the discussion on data center emissions, mainly relevant at an enterprise level, here are a few extra tips for you to reduce your ICT footprint:
Extending the lifespan of your mobile or computer by using secondhand smartphones and computers.
Reducing unnecessary data consumption by reducing the quality of video streaming when not necessary (for example setting it to 144p resolution when listening to a podcast on YouTube).
Limit screen time and digital interactions, which could have other side benefits :).
🔗 - Check these out
The Green Software Foundation and it’s green software practitioner short lesson if you want to write greener code.
The Shift Project - Author of Lean ICT used in this report.