It takes more than a wind farm to clean up a data center

Switching data centers to renewable energy sources like wind and solar only blunts one part of the environmental impact of cloud computing.

Internet infrastructure is made of material machines, that is computers and cables that store and transport our data, and that use a lot of energy. We sat down and talked with Techfestival 2018 keynote speaker and summit host Ingrid Burrington about the role of data centers in the environmental life-cycle of cloud computing.

When warehousing and processing the data collected about us through apps and websites, cloud computers in data centers cause an enormous amount of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.

As a cornerstone the tech sector, the data center industry uses so much energy that it rivals the aviation industry in the scale of its contribution to global warming.

The amount of energy used and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions from the tech sector has been the issue at the center of #ClickClean, a Greenpeace campaign running since 2010 that urges tech companies to switch their data centers to renewable energy.

Even though cloud computing companies are as energy-intensive as airlines, they don’t have the laws of physics working against them in switching to renewable, low-carb energy.

And big tech corporations have started to switch, committing to running entirely on renewables and investing billions of dollars in wind and solar farms.

“For the most part, it’s companies doing the right thing for mostly the right reasons but some of the right reasons are more about economics than environmental stewardship,” says Ingrid Burrington, who among other things covers internet infrastructure for The Atlantic.

For one thing, as she reports in an piece on the topic , the cost of renewable energy is more stable than that of fossil fuels, making longer-term economic planning less risky. And making the data centers less energy inefficient provides companies with a clear economic benefit. But as Ingrid Burrington points out, data centers are only a part of the total environmental footprint of the tech sector.

The cloud is made of rocks

Etymologically, the word ‘cloud’ comes from the Old English clud meaning ‘mass of rock, hill’. And incidentally, cloud computing is in a way performed by rocks in the form of the silicon used for the chips that perform the computations.

“It’s very comforting to remember that computers are mostly just made of rocks. But the thing about using rocks, using minerals is that there are going to be excavation costs to that. Not all the minerals that go into making computers are as toxic, some are more toxic than others, but there’s still going to be an environmental toll because you’re reshaping a landscape and reshaping an environment. And there are human health hazards. Inhaling pure silica is not very safe for human lungs,” says Ingrid Burrington.

From excavation to landfill (or recycling center, preferably), data centers occupy a safe middle part of the life cycle of electronics where it is much easier to mitigate their environmental impact by switching to renewable energy. But once digital devices of all kinds reach the end of their lives, it’s not as simple.

“At least in the United States, most people don’t know what to do with their old phone. They know that they probably can’t throw it in the trash, but they don’t know really what to do with it. So it ends up maybe in a desk drawer. The shorthand or the most familiar public imaginary of what happens to computers when they’re discarded is maybe e-waste fields in Ghana,” says Ingrid Burrington, noting that e-waste ends up in many parts of the world, although mostly in developing countries.

“There’s a weird irony to me to the fact that when a phone loses its usefulness it immediately becomes this toxic artifact. Which is another way of saying that we’re carrying little ticking time bombs of toxic materials with us all the time,” she says.

Besides the environmental impact of production and disposal of electronics, there are other issues that big tech switching data centers to renewable energy does not address.

“For most of the larger companies, making the problem go away by buying a wind farm is a feasible option. But there’s a lot of smaller data centers out there and there’s a lot of fly-by-night operations doing bitcoin mining that don’t give a damn about where their energy is coming from,” says Ingrid Burrington

Regulate utilities like they are utilities

In a way, has data storage and data processing become a utility much in the way of electricity and water?

“That’s an explicit vision of a lot of companies that have made data center cloud computing so ubiquitous. There’s a really good quote in The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s book about Amazon, where Jeff Bezos just straight up literally compares it to building a utility grid. He thinks of it in relation to the history of electricity. Initially, you would have a little power plant that would power one factory and then it became really inefficient for every factory to have it’s own little power plant, so you build a network of power plants and this is the power grid that everyone taps into. And he wanted to do the exact same thing for data centers.”

Does this mean we should start regulating the data industry in the way of utilities?

“In a triage sense, regulating companies and getting them to engage with these processes is a short term stop-the-bleeding approach. But as to getting actual regulation and more exterior oversight and creating more incentives to take responsibility for these things, there’s a business model problem. Of all of the companies, Apple has probably contributed most of the harms to this situation because of the model of planned obsolescence within smartphones. But at the same time, since creating that problem, they’ve stepped up to really integrate their refurbishment processes and return system although they’ve addressed a problem that’s their own fault. I don’t know how many points you get for that.”

But if we do manage to get utility-style regulation of the data industry with regards to energy, do you think that would also help with the privacy situation?

“You know, that would be great. The more cynical approach that I can foresee companies taking is framing it as an individual consumer problem like ‘oh you and your Netflix-binging, you’re the problem’ and then it turns all into some weird mindfulness thing, like ‘less screen time, it’s good for you and it’s good for the planet’. The other thing I can imagine, the other cynical version of this that I can see is it becomes about advocating to developers to write more efficient code, because there is actually a cost to computation and how you compute things. That’s a worthwhile thing to do but it just moves the problem around.”