Data centres are the backbone of our digital infrastructure, processing and storing the vast amounts of data that fuel our modern lives. However, as our reliance on digital services grows exponentially, so does the environmental footprint of these data powerhouses. As a result, the data centre industry now faces a critical challenge: how to meet the rocketing demand for data services while minimising its impact on the planet.
Ark Data Centres has been at the forefront of addressing this challenge since its inception in 1999. At the helm of Ark’s sustainability efforts is Pip Squire – today the company’s Head of Sustainability – whose journey with the company spans over two decades.
“My history with Ark Data Centres goes back to before Ark was Ark in 1999,” he says. “So through our evolutionary journey over the last 20-odd years I have been Engineering & Projects Director, Design & Build Director, Head of Design, Energy & Innovation, Head of Energy & Sustainability – a finger in just about every pie.”
This wealth of experience has positioned Pip uniquely to lead Ark’s sustainability initiatives. “We've always had sustainability at the heart of what we do,” he says, “and that started out in the early days with a real focus on energy efficiency.”
The hidden cost of our digital lives
The average person might not realise the environmental implications of their digital activities. Every photo shared, every video streamed and every document saved in the cloud contributes to the energy consumption of data centres worldwide.
“Data centres are big beasts. We use a lot of energy, absolutely, but compared to the rest of the internet that we are supporting, it's very small,” Pip explains. “50% of all the energy required to run the internet, including end-user devices, is consumed by those devices themselves. 25% of the energy is used sending the data from that end-user device to a data centre. The last 25% is used in the data centre itself. Of this last 25% used in the data centre, 80-85% is used by the servers supporting all our data needs, the remaining 15% is what the data centre consumes to support the servers. In other words, the data centre itself only uses 4% of all the energy we consume to meet our data needs from end to end.”
This breakdown highlights an often-overlooked aspect of digital sustainability: the role of consumer behaviour and end-user devices in the overall energy consumption picture. While data centres can represent an easy target for criticism due to their large, centralised nature, the reality is that consumers’ personal devices, data transmission networks and the servers supporting our data demands play a far more significant role in the environmental impact of our digital lives, than a data centre.
“In the old days, you took photographs with a 35mm camera,” Pip continues. “You had 36 shots on a roll of film, and you were careful about how you took those pictures. You probably printed four and put them in an album and the rest got binned. Now, for every photo, we take two because one might not be perfect. And we don’t delete the one that’s not perfect, we store it in the cloud and leave it there - forever.”
This shift in behaviour has led to an exponential increase in data storage requirements. “People expect things to happen instantly,” Pip says. “When I started out in engineering back in the late 1970s, if I went to a site, I communicated with the head office by telex machine. You’d go to the post office, type four words to report your progress, and get a response back maybe the next day. Now, people want an instant response. Someone sends a WhatsApp message and expects an immediate reply. That is all data, and it’s all being kept and stored.”
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