The energy footprint of the IT sector is estimated at 7 percent of global electricity consumption, according to Greenpeace International.
The data center industry is a small segment of the IT sector, but represents a large portion of power consumption. This includes cloud services, which are a major driver behind data centers. Those data centers emit large amounts of CO2, every single day. In fact, they emit so much Co2 that the data industry has now overtaken the airline industry from before the corona crisis.
With world consumption on the rise, there is no prospect of it falling just for the time being.
High energy consumption of data centers
If you look specifically at the Danish data centers, it also quickly becomes clear that electricity consumption is increasing. COWI has produced a report showing that electricity consumption in Danish data centers in 2020 was 0.88 terawatt hours (TWh). It is expected to increase further to 4.8 TWh in 2030, 8.76 TWh in 2040 and 12.70 TWh in 20501.
If you compare that to a country like Norway, their data centers used 0.8 TWh in 2019. In this respect, Denmark and Norway are similar. The big difference comes as all data centers in Norway run on 100% sustainable energy, which is not the case in Denmark.
Bitcoin's massive energy consumption
The growing interest in Bitcoin has also had a major impact on the data industry, which uses huge amounts of power to produce Bitcoins. In fact, it requires so much energy that Bitcoin uses more energy per year than countries like the Netherlands and Sweden.
That's why it's crucial that data centers give something back to the climate. We are proud to be part of the fight for the climate.
The Green Energy
Among other things, we know that our data centers are run on 100% green and sustainable energy through power from hydropower plants in Sweden — in modern terms hydro power4.
In Copenhagen, a new groundwater cooling system has been created, located 70 meters underground, which naturally cools the water to a temperature of 10-11 degrees. By pumping cold water from one reservoir to another through a heat exchanger in the data center, the cooling ability of the water is exploited, which also reduces the load on the coolers. The reduced cooling burden results in an annual energy saving of more than 1,200 MWh. In this way, we ensure that we reduce our CO2 footprint at the same time as we participate in the fight for the climate.
It is also essential that it does not change the performance of our data centers. They're still running at the highest level. This makes the situation completely optimal. We help the climate while maintaining our high performance.
