The hidden environmental impact of using our phones

You’ve ditched the plastic and cut down on gas-guzzling travel. But did you know that every email, tweet, text and Insta post is also harming the planet? John Arlidge explains the startling environmental cost of your data
PA
John Arlidge14 November 2019

Many of us wake up with a tap of our mobile phone alarm.

We check the weather, our emails, text messages, WhatsApps, Instagram and Twitter before we even get out of bed. We download podcasts on our way to work, then spend our day online, giving little thought to the size of the files we cheerfully send around our office — or the globe. Later, at home, we stream movies on Netflix and shop on Amazon. Our virtual world is always just a click away, stored in the ‘data cloud’. It all seems so convenient, so quick, so cheap, so fluffy. What could possibly be wrong with it?

Plenty, it turns out. To find out why, you need to go to some pretty far-flung places. The seabed in the Orkney Islands; inside a mountain in Wales; the Arctic Circle in Sweden; Amsterdam; Nevada, Colorado, Seattle, North Carolina or Virginia in the US; and Slough. It is in these places that you’ll find the harsh physical reality of our digital lives: the tubes buried in the earth, the messy bundles of wires and hot servers, their green and blue blinking lights and whirring disks making them look and sound like twittering goblins.

At Equinix, one such data centre on a trading estate on the outskirts of Slough, Matthew George, one of the firm’s senior managers, takes me through a series of doors that only select employees can open with a palm print into a room of servers, held in locked metal cages. They are much like the computers we have in our homes or offices — except that there are rather more of them: 200,000 in fact. Together, they can process 7,000 terabytes a second. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. But it needs to be. If you download or stream a film on Netflix, it will come via Equinix. The centre will also handle most of your social media posts and your online banking. For Londoners, Slough is where the internet lives.

At the heart of everything we do online are data centres like this one. The number of these facilities, dubbed the ‘brains’ of the internet, is growing fast. Hundreds of thousands will be built in the next five years, says Dr John Andresen, a leading analyst and associate professor at the Research Centre for Carbon Solutions based at the Heriot-Watt University, which has campuses in Scotland, Dubai and Malaysia.

You’ll probably never recognise one — they don’t have signs on them, to guard against attacks — but they are having as big an effect on our environment as the factories that fired the white heat of the industrial revolution. That’s because processing and storing the tsunami of bits and bytes that surge between our devices and servers at the speed of light is far from cost-free.

Take something as seemingly innocuous as a text message. Every time we send one, it makes a round trip of 8,000 miles. First, it makes its way to a beach in north Cornwall, where undersea cables carry it usually to North America, where it ends up in data centres anywhere from Virginia to Seattle. Because IT companies do not want to lose our data, most of our messages, Tweets, emails, Instagram posts and photos are held numerous times over in different data centres in each country. Once multiple copies have been made, the message then makes its way back across the pond. Ping!

That journey and all those data centres, of course, require a constant supply of electricity. But that’s just the start. Since we cannot tolerate the slightest delay or interruption to our online gaming, YouTube video or anything else, data centres tend to run at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. To guard against a power failure, they further rely on giant lead acid batteries or banks of generators, which emit diesel exhaust fumes.

One thing we know all too well from our mobile phones is that electronic devices generate heat. All those servers create sauna-like conditions in data centres — up to 60-70C, says Andresen. For every unit of energy of data that enters all but the most modern data centres, analysts say an equal amount of energy is required for cooling, usually provided by energy-greedy industrial air conditioning systems or vast fans.

The amount of energy needed to power all those data centres and cooling systems is growing so fast that globally it is now equivalent to the total annual power consumption of Canada. By next year, data centres in the EU will consume around 4 per cent of all energy used in the region. In the US, the IT sector already accounts for more than 5 per cent of energy consumption. Some analysts reckon that by 2025-2030, IT will gobble up as much as a tenth of global electricity. Slough’s Equinix data centre consumes enough electricity to power 300,000 homes.

The trouble is, in many countries more than half of the energy for data centres comes from fossil fuels, mainly coal- and gas-fired power plants. That means, Andresen says, processing and storing all our data accounts for around 3-4 per cent of all CO2 emissions. That’s more than air travel, which is around 2-3 per cent. This is our industry’s dirty secret, senior tech executives concede, without ever summoning up the courage to go on the record.

And that’s just the beginning. We’re going to be creating a lot more data in the future and tech companies are going to be processing it more intensely. Superfast 5G networks are being launched and the ‘internet of things’ is growing fast. The number of objects, from fridges to cars, connected to the web is expected to jump from 27 billion last year to 125 billion in 2030, according to forecasts from IHS Markit. As a result, the data we create every year will reach 180 zettabytes (180 followed by 21 zeroes) by 2025, market-research firm IDC says.

Who is to blame for this planet-threatening tangle of ethernet cables? That, alas, would be you and me — in an unholy alliance with the tech giants. We love their products and demand instant access to them 24 /7. ‘Digital natives regard it as almost a human right to get whatever they want online, whenever they want it,’ George says. He should know: he has two teenage daughters.

What can be done to improve things? The easiest way to reduce our data footprint would be a tax or charge on data use — for example, a fee for uploading photographs to Instagram. But no government with half an eye on re-election would ever impose what would be such a crashingly unpopular policy.

Some enterprising companies are trying to appeal to our better nature, though. Node Pole, a Swedish industry group based in the northern city of Skellefteä, believes a new ‘Fossil Free Data’ kitemark will encourage consumers to choose energy providers for their homes that also invest in green data centres. To earn the label, firms must run data centres on 100 per cent renewable energy. ‘We want to start turning in a more sustainable direction,’ says Christoffer Svanberg, the group’s communications officer.

Some of the tech behemoths are also taking action — starting by defending their position. They argue that computerising business transactions and everyday tasks generates a net saving on energy and resources. Big data, they say, will massively improve the efficiency of everything from rail and road transport to the amount of water and fertiliser farmers use on fields. Some academics agree. Jonathan Koomey, an energy policy expert and former research fellow at Stanford University, argues that the benefit of big data far outweighs its short-term costs.

At the same time, the tech giants are trying to reduce their long-term energy usage by choosing to install their own data centres in countries with cooler climates or collaborating with data-centre operators already in those countries. Nordic nations, with vast wind and hydroelectric resources as well as cool temperatures, offer a significant reduction in energy consumption. Facebook has a facility in the steel town of Lulea, Sweden, 70 miles from the Arctic Circle. Google is expanding its €2bn data centres in Finland. Microsoft has sunk a bank of servers secured in a pressurised steel container 117ft into the Atlantic Ocean, just off the Orkney Islands, where the water temperature never rises above a nippy four degrees.

Outside cold countries — and oceans — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google all say they are working towards powering all their data centres using 100 per cent renewable energy. Apple’s facility in North Carolina includes an enormous solar farm and biogas facility that collects methane from waste generated by the region’s dairy cows. The tech industry is now the biggest corporate buyer of renewables, inking deals for 10.4 gigawatts to date, according to Bloomberg. That’s almost two-thirds of the total global demand.

But critics argue that not all tech firms are moving toward a carbon-free future fast enough. Gary Cook, who runs Greenpeace’s ClickClean campaign, says: ‘More than half of the energy consumed at the data centres most of the big firms use still comes from fossil fuel, at times of the day or year when renewable sources are not available.’

Equinix in Slough is a rarity because it successfully uses 100 per cent renewables all the time. ‘We do use a lot of power but we are able to leverage solar and wind and other sources of renewable energy all the time from the national grid,’ says James Green, who was one of the engineers who helped to build the firm’s London data centres before moving into finance. ‘We strive for that globally but it’s hard in other countries because there is often no national grid and you have to buy from whatever local companies offer.’ Who knew Slough was so ahead of the curve?

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in