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Despite what you may have heard about the big tech companies and their colossal, power-hungry data factories and high-performance computing factories, these aren’t the bad guys in Earth’s history, analysts say. In fact, they’re actually quite eco-efficient.
That’s according to two leading scientists in technology, energy and the environment, both former researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. In a recent commentary published in the sustainable development-focused journal Joule, Professors Jonathan Koomey and Eric Masanet argue that fear of environmental damage from the rising tide of digital activity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, may be slightly exaggerated.
These grim claims come from well-meaning researchers, they say, who might start with reasonable assumptions that ultimately turn into crass extrapolations. This is in part because they neglect to take into account a very positive point in the Silicon Valley company: its rapid pace of technological innovation. From processing to memory to storage area networks, computing is continually being revolutionized to an impressive end. The authors cite data from two of the world’s largest network operators: Telefónica, a Spanish telecommunications company, and Cogent, an Internet service provider based in Washington, DC; in 2020, a 45% increase in data flow resulted in no additional energy consumption at Telefonica, and at Cogent, despite a 38% increase in traffic, the company managed to reduce its energy consumption by 21%.
Innovation is also happening in the largest cloud data centers, the behemoths of the acreage managed by Amazon, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft, which consume enormous amounts of power. While the data workload of these places has increased by more than 2,600% over the past decade, power consumption in all data centers has increased by less than 10% as traditional data centers less efficient have been abandoned in favor of cloud computing.
It might sound like a victory for Big Tech, but what about another vilified carbon giant: bitcoin mining? It’s actually worrying, say the authors. Better efficiency doesn’t have the same effect on blockchain as it always gets longer as tokens are passed from person to person, increasing the burden of complex puzzles that supercomputers have to solve. to check it during the extraction process.
“It’s a hot spot that needs to be watched very closely and could be a problem,” Masanet told The New York Times.
Bitcoin mining currently accounts for 0.4% of global energy consumption, according to an estimate from the University of Cambridge, which doesn’t seem like much, until one considers that the cryptocurrency belongs to only about 1.3% of the world’s population. Meanwhile, all other data centers in the world only consume 1% of its power.
“I think that’s a really good use of that high value-added 1%,” Koomey told The New York Times. “I’m not sure the same is true for the bitcoin share.”
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