The rising carbon footprint of the internet and concerns over 'dark data'

There is a significant knock-on effect of everyday devices in terms of energy use

Internet and online services account for about 10 per cent of global electricity demand. Getty Images

If Cristiano Ronaldo, Portugal and Saudi Arabia’s Al Nasser star player, posts something on Instagram, the energy needed to send the post to fans around the world could power 10 homes for a year.

That is according to calculations by researchers at Loughborough University in the UK, who have analysed the carbon impact of personal and commercial internet use.

As more everyday devices – from phones to televisions, from heating or cooling systems to cars – are connected to the internet and generate data, there is a significant knock-on effect in terms of energy use.

One study published this year said that internet and online services accounted for about 10 per cent of global electricity demand, which means that the impact in carbon emissions is more than aviation and shipping.

Within a decade, internet and online services’ share of global power demand will reach about one fifth.

Worsening figures

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth in the UK have stated that in 2018, in total 33 zettabytes of data (where a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes) were “created, captured, copied and consumed”. Estimates suggests that this year the figure will be around 147 zettabytes.

There has been, said Prof Ian Hodgkinson, from the Business School at Loughborough University, “a huge explosion of new data creation”.

“Of course that data has to go somewhere,” he said. “A large proportion of it will end up in storage within data centres.”

Prof Tom Jackson and Prof Ian Hodgkinson say a lot of unused data continues to use up energy in the data centres where it is stored. Photo: courtesy of Loughborough Business School

His colleague, Prof Tom Jackson, said that aside from the large amounts of data generated by consumer devices, industrial and commercial applications also had a big impact.

“If you think about the financial sector, the transactions that have to be recorded are absolutely huge,” he said.

“You have got healthcare, which takes up about one third of all data generated and is increasing all the time because we want to find a breakthrough for all the various diseases.”

Dark data

A key issue, said Prof Jackson, is that a lot of data is not used, yet it continues to use up energy in the data centres where it is stored.

He and his colleagues have branded this “dark data”, a term that covers almost two-thirds of all data generated.

Much of the energy demand at data centres is for cooling, which helps to explain why many such facilities have been constructed in colder parts of the world.

In a paper he co-wrote in 2022, Dr Paul Upham, of Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, noted that data centres were large in size and constructed on “previously undeveloped land, rural and urban hinterland and now in the far north of Europe”.

Facebook, for example, has built multiple data centres in Lulea in Sweden, a location that is as far north as Alaska.

The power needs of data centres are such that some are putting strain on electricity networks, Dr Upham told The National.

Some data centre owners have struck deals to directly buy renewable energy, such as at Google’s facility in Eemshaven in the Netherlands, where there are purchase agreements with nearby wind turbines and solar farms.

“They are taking various measures – they're running business-to-business power-purchase agreements so they set up their own renewable energy supply.

“That helps, but when they do that they are consuming labour and other resources that are also scarce for the rest of the grid.

“ … Even though [they are] increasingly using renewable energy, those renewable energy supplies are finite as well.”

Facebook, owned by parent company Meta, has built multiple data centres in Lulea in Sweden, a location that is as far north as Alaska. Reuters

So removing the link between data storage and carbon emissions is not easy. Dr Upham said that it was “difficult to see a way out without some major technological fix” if constraints were not to be placed on the activities of companies.

“The data centres have their own incentive to become more efficient, but their growth in quantity outstrips that and the growth in our consumption outstrips that,” he said.

One innovative way of dealing with the excess heat generated by data centres, thereby limiting their carbon emissions, is to channel it into heating systems, a strategy deployed in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.

A set-up involving, among others, the city authorities, an investment group, a power company and a fibre optic cable firm, makes it easier for data centres to establish themselves and for their excess heat to be fed into district heating.

Dialling down usage

Aside from trying to reduce the carbon footprint of data centres by using renewable energy or diverting excess heat, another approach is to reduce the amount of data generated and stored.

This has been a focus of the research by Prof Hodgkinson and Prof Jackson, who are keen to see companies consider “digital decarbonisation”, a term they coined to describe efforts to reduce unnecessary data storage.

Prof Hodgkinson said that best practice involved an organisation understanding what data it had, where it sat and what value it had.

“While these might seem relatively simple actions, they can have a huge impact cumulatively over time,” he said.

“If organisations are consciously and consistently evaluating the relevance of their data and disposing of data if it’s no longer needed, that makes a huge impact in terms of reducing bottom line costs … as well as reducing the data’s CO2 emissions.”

One option is to move data that does not need to be accessed immediately into “cold storage”, such as storage on tape. Whenever necessary it can be transferred back into a form in which it can easily be accessed.

Often, Prof Hodgkinson said, data drops out of an organisation’s “corporate memory” to the extent that no one realises that it exists and is continuing to consume energy.

He and his colleagues have “been shocked”, he said, by the amount of entities that simply do not have limiting data generation and storage on their agenda.

Before an organisation begins any new project that involves data, Prof Jackson advises looking at how much data might be needed, where it will be stored and what the impact is going to be in terms of CO2 emissions.

And while it might be too much to expect celebrities like Ronaldo and the rest of us to stop using social media, he said that consumers could have a positive impact by pressuring platform providers to be more careful with data.

“I think it’s more around the platforms … and asking providers, ‘What is my carbon footprint?’ We should put the onus back on the companies that provide these social media platforms,” he said.