![]() This requires either energy when using traditional air cooling, or water when servers are cooled by evaporating water, which is more energy-efficient. Most of the energy in data centers is used to power servers, but the huge facilities also produce heat and need to be cooled. The two resources are interlinked - especially when it comes to cooling. In the “last year or two,” the availability of water also started to play a bigger role in decisions on locations, he added. This winter, it's Christmas lights that will be dimmed to cut down on energy use.Įnergy availability and prices have always played a part in the complex calculation of picking a spot for a new center, said Landon Marston, assistant professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. sent employees to their roofs to spray cooling units with hosepipes - while people across the Continent faced water-rationing measures. In a bid to tame the heat, data centers in the U.K. If temperatures exceed what data centers are designed for, every degree beyond the threshold can mean some 10 to 15 percent of capacity is lost. Two leading London hospitals suffered problems with their IT systems, causing weeks of canceled operations and postponed appointments.ĭata centers saw a breach of their design conditions for the first time and have now reached “uncharted territories,” said Richard Clifford, head of innovation at data center consultancy Keysource. This summer's intense heat shows up new problems.ĭue to “unseasonably high temperatures” hitting the United Kingdom in July, two cooler units in an Oracle data center experienced outages, forcing part of the cloud infrastructure to go into a protective shutdown. “They are buying green energy very cheaply they put down wind farms, which are actually meant for residents in the Netherlands, but it goes into a data center,” local activist Susan Schaap told POLITICO at her kitchen table. This summer, Facebook's owner Meta Platforms dropped plans to build a data center on the outskirts of Zeewolde, a town of 23,000 people near Amsterdam, after local activists lobbied against a large project that would drink up green power that could benefit residents. Pressure pointsĮU policymakers are wading into a debate over data centers' demands that isn't new but is becoming more acute as climate change means more Europeans face far hotter and drier summers. Reining in the energy- and water-hungry industry is a balancing act: As "more and more calculation tasks and storage capacities" are done in the cloud, data centers are where the green and digital transition risk getting in each other's way. data centers on the one hand and ensuring that businesses and households can access electricity on the other hand," the Commission text says. Public authorities "should not be put in the position of having to choose between attracting. According to a draft obtained by POLITICO, they could by 2025 get a label detailing their energy and water usage - just like fridges or washing machines. The European Commission is planning to announce a plan this fall calling out data centers' environmental impact. Water too is becoming a scarce resource - 2022's hottest summer on record saw major European waterways reaching a historic low point. ![]()
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