How using the internet damages the environment

Every minute, data centres receive tens of millions of requests about the weather, and having an answer for that difficult question relies on tremendously complex operations that use vast amounts of information gathered from around the world.

But those operations – and many more like it, from uploading a picture to streaming a film on Netflix – are having a vast impact on that weather. The very technology we use to understand our world could at the same time be changing it in profound ways.

At 2 per cent of total emissions, the IT industry’s carbon footprint is roughly the same as the entire airline industry. The vast warehouses of data that are dotted around the world can use as much power as a large city.

The environmental impact of the devices we use to access the internet is widely known and much discussed. But this is only the most visible and physical part of technology’s footprint. Just as important are the data centres that the devices access millions of times each day, which whirr away unseen in some of the most anonymous parts of the globe. They are to the information revolution what the factory was to the industrial revolution; powerhouses for profound changes to the world, not only through technological change but also by altering the environment.

If there is anything as important to powering the world as energy, then it must be data. It is being generated then accessed all the time. To ensure that people are able to deposit and withdraw it when needed, the world’s internet companies run data centres; vast warehouses stuffed full of computer systems, used for storage and processing of information.

The sheer speed at which data processing happens is almost impossible to grasp: in a single minute, nearly 4 million searches are made on Google; Netflix users watch nearly 100,000 hours of video; and the US Weather Channel alone gets 18 million forecast requests, according to cloud company Domo. Every single byte of each of those operations relies on data centres, and each of those centres requires vast amounts of energy to run the systems and ensure they remain cool.

Technology companies for the most part don’t need convincing about the value of clean power to do that work. Apple, for instance, runs all of its facilities on renewable power; Google has become the world’s largest buyer of renewable energy, and says it matches all of its electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases.

Companies are also working to reduce the amount of energy their data centres even need; rather than making that energy renewable, they aim not to need quite so much of it in the first place. Google, for instance, claims to have made its systems more efficient, with its data centres providing seven times as much computing power for the energy consumed as they did five years ago. The same sort of machine learning capabilities that power its other products looks after the cooling of its data centres, which it claims gives energy savings of up to 30 per cent.

But the challenge comes when companies – and their data use – grow quickly. Internet companies might be genuine in their commitment to clean energy, but it can be difficult for them to actually ensure that they use it when their needs are so high.

It’s in Virginia, on the east coast of the US, where that need really becomes clear. While less known than other homes of the US tech industry – certainly less discussed than Silicon Valley, Seattle or New York – so-called “Data Centre Alley” sits at the top of Northern Virginia and is in many ways the internet’s heart, pumping the data that powers it around the rest of the world.

All of that pumping takes power. And that power is not provided by the technology companies, but by local companies – in Virginia, that responsibility falls to Dominion Energy, for instance, which has largely resisted the use of renewable sources of electricity.

In May, a host of technology companies – some well known, such as Apple, alongside largely unacknowledged data centre companies like Equinix – wrote to Virginia regulators to urge them to ensure that the energy to run their data centres would come from clean sources. It made clear that the companies wanted energy that is “generated by clean, renewable energy” and expressed concern that instead it would be met with “expensive fossil fuel projects”. Greenpeace, which has over the last 10 years worked hard to document the environmental impact of data centres, says that Dominion has in fact used the growing energy requirements of the tech industry to justify investments in natural gas supply and generation, making the state ever more reliant on energy that the companies who use it are resisting.

It means that consumers are a long way from the point at which the energy decision is made.

Adding yet more complexity, many companies can’t fully provide their own data capabilities – the same fast growth that leads data centre companies to give in to fossil fuels also means IT companies have to outsource their data centre requirements. Even Apple requires third-party facilities for some of its work, for instance. It includes that energy use in its own renewable energy goals and matches all that power with renewable energy – but such work can be more difficult for companies without the same clout.

A company such as messaging service Slack, for instance, is among the biggest in the world but still relies on Amazon Web Services to power its data centres. It means that it has little choice about how information is stored. It’s far from alone. Amazon says more than a million companies rely on its web services division, and that includes some of the world’s biggest data-powered companies, like Netflix.

The fact that data is sent all around the world through largely invisible processes makes accountability almost impossible. Netflix might show you a film that is being served up from a data centre, but that doesn’t mean it is operating it; outsourcing means that data tends to be held in rooms that the company you are paying might not even know about, let alone run. So even if you are able to find out exactly where data is being stored, it is hard to put pressure on the people that are storing it, because they are going through another company.

Still, it is possible to track down some details on how responsible individual companies are choosing to be. Since 2010, Greenpeace has run a campaign called “Clickclean”, which allows people to look at rankings for any given technology company and understand how they are powered.

So for streaming video, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play all get A ranks, for instance. Netflix, Vimeo and HBO Go are all criticised by campaigners. The same is true in messaging, where Google, Apple and Facebook once again rank highly but Twitter and WeChat are criticised in harsh terms.

Campaigners urge users to look at those rankings in the same way as they might a listing of connection speeds or how many films are available on a given streaming service. “You should be aware that your online activity has an environmental footprint – be aware of the ones you use most, and ask how they are doing with renewable energy,” says Gary Cook, who works on the Clickclean campaign at Greenpeace. “People have a lot of power here and they should believe that – companies really care about maintaining customers.”

Even the very act of taking a photo brings its own kind of energy use. On most phones, the snap will be instantly delivered to the cloud, most likely replicated numerous times in various datacentres across the world, each piece of data matched by a piece of energy.

In the face of the scale of that energy use, and how entirely impossible it can seem to grasp, it can seem tempting to ignore the issue entirely. The energy required to use Facebook for a year, for instance, was calculated at roughly the same as making a cup of coffee; the impact of our data can be vast when taken together but seem small at the individual level. What’s more, using these services can seem inevitable: even if you don’t actually log on to Facebook, the very act of browsing the web adds to its store of information, and there’s very little you can do about it. Just as recycling a bottle can seem irrelevant in the face of the profusion of plastic that clogs up our ocean, making our digital life sustainable can feel inconsequential.

But people have already made a difference. In 2011, for instance, Facebook announced that it would move away from coal and instead focus on clean energy; it followed a two-year campaign by Greenpeace, during which hundreds of thousands of Facebook users called on the company to “Unfriend Coal”. Facebook explicitly recognised the social media-powered campaign when it made the decision, and said then that it hoped other campaigns would use its site to engage with clean energy issues.

Facebooks servers, then powered by burning fossil fuels, had lit up with activity from users who demanded that those same posts were fuelled with something cleaner. Non-renewable energy was being used to campaign for its own downfall. Data is slowly getting cleaner.