EVALUATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES CONCERNING DATA CENTRES

Abstract

Data centres are core to businesses, government operations and modern digital society. The rapid change of technologies and increasing applications and data demands place stress on traditional on-premises data centres to keep up with the rising cost of computing infrastructure demands. Companies are turning to cloud computing for their needs and the number of cloud-based services and solutions are predicted to continue to increase, taking up an estimated 60% of IT market growth (Goddard, 2018). The cloud services market forecast by Gartner expected the market to grow to a total of $266.4 billion in 2020, from $227.8 in 2019 (Stamford, 2019). However, data centres’ environmental footprint is one of the growing concerns by cloud providers and governments as data centres scale up rapidly. Data centres have been estimated to consume about 1% of global electricity and expected to grow by 3% in 2020 (IEA, 2017). Besides electricity consumption, there are other environmental footprints created by data centres. This report first presents the understanding of different data centres and various environmental impacts associated with data centres across industry. The international standards and guidelines for data centres in relation to the environment are also included as they play an important role to regulate and improve the industry’s sustainability. The report also highlights studies on selected multinational companies’ data centres and their environmental initiatives and environmental footprints in order to perform a review of the underlying environmental issues, including those in Singapore. Singapore is one of the top choices for data centre location in the region and with land constraint an impeding factor for data centre energy demands, sustainability of data centres is a crucial factor to sustain its long-term growth and competitive advantage. Lastly, the report provides recommendations on improving environmental management for data centres and suggestions on topics for further studies. One of the key findings of the studies is that energy and water use in data centres will continue to be major environmental related concerns in the industry in Singapore, and to address those concerns, strengthening of policies and making use of innovative technologies and test bedding of new research projects such as tropical data centres will be essential in the coming years.