Cover story: How can technology deal with climate-related concerns?
As a historically resource-hungry and energy-intensive industry, how can tech begin to address climate-related concerns?
One of the most significant areas for change in tech concerns power supply. Greenpeace has long made a point of tracking the green credentials – or lack thereof – of the tech industry, and publishing its findings. In 2011, it calculated that the world’s data centres were already consuming 1.5% to 2% of global electricity. A new Apple data centre in North Carolina, US, had been estimated to need power equivalent to that of 80,000 homes. Up to 95% of that power was to come from traditional sources, including coal and nuclear energy. Green sources were on the radar of tech giants: Google and Yahoo! had already started investing in producing their own renewables. At the same time, the cloud had been hailed as a green infrastructure alternative to individually owned servers. However, in their report How dirty is your data?, Greenpeace reported that the available data failed to offer objective evaluation of green claims.
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