Computer Electronics

Green IT could curb billions of carbon dioxide emissions

09 March 2021

The adoption of cloud computing could prevent the emission of more than 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2021 through 2024, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp (IDC).

A key factor in reducing the CO2 emissions comes from the greater efficiency of aggregated compute resources. Emissions reductions are driven by the aggregation of computation from discrete enterprise datacenters to larger-scale centers that can manage power capacity efficiently, optimize cooling, leverage power-efficient servers and increase server utilization rates.

"The idea of 'green IT' has been around now for years, but the direct impact of hyperscale computing can have on CO2 emissions is getting increased notice from customers, regulators, and investors and it's starting to factor into buying decisions," said Cushing Anderson, program vice president at IDC. "For some, going 'carbon neutral' will be achieved using carbon offsets, but designing datacenters from the ground up to be carbon neutral will be the real measure of contribution. And for advanced cloud providers, matching workloads with renewable energy availability will further accelerate their sustainability goals."

IDC said the magnitude of savings in emissions is based on the degree to which a kilowatt of power generates CO2 and the greatest opportunity may be migrating to cloud datacenters in regions with higher values of CO2 emitted per kilowatt hour such as the Asia/Pacific region that is expected to account for more than half of the CO2 emissions savings in the next four years. The EMEA region will deliver about 10% of the savings due to its use of power sources with lower CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour.

Cloud computing can shift workloads to any location around the globe, further lowering CO2 emissions allowing workloads to be shifted to enable greater use of renewable materials. Cloud datacenters do this through optimizing the physical environment and reducing the amount of energy spent to cool the datacenter equipment. The goal is to have more energy spent on running the IT equipment than cooling the environment where the equipment is housed.

IDC forecasts that if the percentage of green cloud datacenters today stays where it is, the migration to the cloud itself would save 629 million metric tons over the four-year time frame. If all datacenters in use in 2024 were designed for sustainability, then 1.6 billion metric tons could be saved. IDC projects more than 1 billion metric tons assumes that 60% of datacenters will adopt the technology and process sustainable “smarter” datacenters by 2024.

The full research can be found in IDC’s Worldwide CO2 Emissions Savings from Cloud Computing Forecast, 2021–2024: A First-of-Its-Kind Projection.

To contact the author of this article, email PBrown@globalspec.com


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