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Like everything, data, too, needs power & water.
Updated: July 1, 2023. Readers, first of all, please accept my apologies for sharing a report whose results are not what they seemed to be.
Rudolf van der Berg emailed earlier this morning to share his concerns about the efficacy of this study on energy and water use. He pointed out that the data has been misinterpreted, and he has filed his concerns with the universities behind the report. What prompted him to dig deeper was that “the estimates for the Netherlands were too low by a factor of 4 and Finland too high.”
When he scrutinized their data, he found they misquoted the OECD and IEA data and the work of a Finnish researcher. The OECD doesn’t collect fixed broadband usage data. The OECD has had mobile usage since 2010, and growth is not linear.
“Measuring network energy by how many gigabytes are transferred is like working out how much energy is consumed by streetlights by counting how many cars pass underneath them,” van der Berg said at a conference recently.
Occasionally, I come across reports about the environmental impact of the Internet and cloud services. While most reports make theoretical assertions, a new research report offers quantifiable data on the environmental impact of the Internet across Europe. I have highlighted what I found notable.
- Data usage in OECD-Europe will grow from 86 to 225 exabytes by 2030.
- In 2020, the average European used 187.3 Gigabytes (GB) of data yearly, a 286% increase compared to 2015.
- The growth in data is going to keep going up. Per capita, energy usage will increase from the 2020 average of 54.9 kWh to 226 kWh by 2030.
- Estimated yearly energy consumption for data usage is expected to increase from the average level of 29.8 TWh in 2020 up to around 112.7 TWh by 2030
- The water needed to support this data growth will increase from 273.4 to 820.1 million cubic meters.
- Per capita, yearly water consumption for data services could increase from 0.3 to 1.1 cubic meters.
In case you were wondering, water is a key part of data center infrastructure and is a key requirement. To estimate the energy and water requirements, the study uses the following logic:
- One Megawatt (MW) data center uses 25.5 million liters of water per year for cooling. Water consumption is based on the energy used, not the data center’s capacity. One MW data center operating without interruption consumes 8670 Megawatt/hours (MWh) of electricity annually. The study assumes this number won’t change through 2030. Data
There were a few other notable data points I thought were interesting. For example,
- Data centers have become more energy efficient. Despite an increase in computing workloads of 550 percent from 2010 to 2018, the energy demand has increased by only six percent.
- It took about 0.3/kW-hour (kWh) per GB of processed data in 2018, up from about 4.5 kWh to 5.1 kWh required in 2012.
- The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centers and data transmission networks consume globally 2.1% to 2.4% of the global final electricity demand.
- Data transmission networks alone consumed 30% to 36% more electricity than data centers in 2020, but their energy consumption has been relatively constant globally since 2010, despite an increase in total network footprint.
- In 2021 around 40% of the electricity consumed by data transmission networks corresponded to wired media, while wireless networks consumed the remainder energy. The 4G and 5G networks need more power.
Here are comparables for the United States, the largest Internet infrastructure market.
- In 2020, the US data centers in the United States consumed around 660 million cubic meters of water.
- The US uses roughly 36% of the global electricity in data centers.
Full study! (h/t Rudolf van der Berg.)