Data increase contributes to carbon emissions
Asia-based SpaceDC has published a white paper examining the key considerations and impacts faced by a digital economy boom.
The white paper, Green Data Centers Key to Southeast Asian Digital Economy Boom, explores one of the region’s first green datacentre situated in Indonesia that is designed by SpaceDC. It also analyses the benefits and growing trend of sustainable datacentres.
According to the datacentre vendor, storage of “digital data is set to generate 14 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions by 2040”.
In today’s digital age, data is an increasingly critical resource and the mainstay of everyday digital services such as ride hailing, digital purchases, or just about any online transaction. Big data applications such as cloud services have become the backbone of many companies, improving business processes significantly.
The paper states, “public cloud is estimated to contribute to a total economic impact of about US$450 billion across Asia between 2019 and 2023”.
“As usage increases, datacentres will face not only the issue of higher electrical costs and the need for a resilient and reliable infrastructure but also the often-irreversible impact on the environment,” states SpaceDC.
“In view of this, governments across the world have imposed stricter regulations on carbon emissions by the technology sector. Examples include Beijing’s ban on data centres with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.5 or higher, and Indonesia’s Regulation No 82.”
According to SpaceDC, government regulations coupled with increased overall expenditure in hosting and sustaining digital infrastructure for both providers and consumers alike sees more companies revaluating their green methodology and moving towards green datacentres.
Earlier this year, tech giant, Microsoft, took a pledge to be carbon negative by 2030, with an ambitious plan to cut their direct carbon emissions for their entire supply and value chain, said Darren Hawkins, CEO of SpaceDC.
“Digital globalisation will continue to soar, and it is more imperative now than ever for organisations to implement smarter and cleaner ways of consuming energy to stay competitive,” he said.
“In addition to cost efficiencies, green datacentres are the key to a sustainable and longer-term business model of the future. Our first green datacentre in the region opened to astounding success and we encourage more organisations to join us on the road to sustainability.”
SpaceDC notes the paradigm shift from traditional datacentres to sustainable datacentres thus becomes imperative to the success of businesses and a greener future, and the trend towards more energy efficient datacentres is on the rise.
“In some countries such as Ireland, the booming datacentre economy is already outpacing their energy supplies,” SpaceDC states. “To support the continuous industry growth, countries all over the world will have to look to new alternatives, and this is where green datacentres come into play as the next industry standard.”
