Green Data Centers

One of the main concerns of cloud data-centers is the consumption of huge amount of electrical energy which results in emission of carbon dioxide. Almost, fifty percent of the electrical energy consumption is for cooling the devices rather than using it for computing resources. The generation of heat and the cooling leaves a huge amount of foot prints of carbon on the atmosphere, which is a serious social issue - global warming. Gartner 2007 says that about 2% of the global carbon dioxide emissions are done by Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry. This necessitates the construction of zero emission data centers - Green Data Centers.

Individually, our everyday browsing has a relatively minuscule impact. Google, in response to claims that each search on its site generated as much CO2 as boiling half the water for a cup of coffee (7g), calculated the true figure was much lower, at 0.2g. Watching a YouTube video of cats was higher – 1g for every 10 minutes of viewing – while using Gmail for a year produced about 1.2kg a user.

Not to be outdone, Facebook put a figure on its average user’s annual footprint – 269g of CO2, roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee.

Google and Amazon are among the companies using an obsolete tool to calculate their data center emissions from the electricity they purchase from the power grid, according to Lux Research.The research firm has developed a new analytical tool that finds data centers underestimate coal usage by 30 percent or more, and thus have much higher emissions than they report.

Google misses the mark in four out of its seven data centers. Google uses eGRID to estimate its electricity emissions, but four of Google’s seven major US data centers rely more on coal than the data reported by eGRID implies. As a result, Google’s emissions are likely larger than they estimated by 42,000 MT CO2e per year, Lux Research says.

Amazon estimates are off in more than 20 centers. Amazon is less transparent about how it calculates its emissions, but its 23 Virginia-based cloud services data centers use about 43 percent electricity from coal — not 35 percent as estimated using eGRID. This difference amounts to 85,000 MT CO2e per year more.

Apple gets the worst ratings in a Greenpeace report that claims cloud computing companies are perpetuating the use of fossil fuels.

The report, How Dirty is Your Data?, compares energy choices made by Apple, Google, Facebook, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon.com and Akamai – described by Greenpeace as ten of the top “global cloud companies”.

Facebook, Apple, Google, eBay, and Microsoft have pledged to move their new data centers toward all-green operations. At some point, others may be forced to follow.

A modest 1 MW data center facility can easily consume more than 4.4 million liters (1.2 million gallons) annually, according to Emerson Network Power’s Jack Pouchet from, who also sits on the board of directors of The Green Grid, a nonprofit that promotes IT resource efficiency. As cloud computing skyrockets and water scarcity worsens in many places globally, data centers are increasingly competing for a limited resource.

Project to Use Data Center Waste Heat to Farm Fish
The Foundry Project in will recycle waste heat generated from an underground data center and then use it to warm the Northcoast Fish Farm, reported ZDnet.

India and Data Centers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) appears to be planning to build at least one cloud data center in India in 2016, following announcements by Microsoft and IBM.