The Cost of "The Cloud"

Technology's Environmental Costs

In lieu of governments and industry making the necessary decisions to curb the worst effects of climate change, we individuals are encouraged to do as much as we can to reduce our own carbon footprints. Heading the list is reducing our use of fossil fuels. Obvious examples include switching to electric or hybrid vehicles, and to heat pumps and battery-powered yard tools (e.g., chainsaws, trimmers), where feasible. Even if the electricity going to your home is based on fossil fuels, you reduce the amount of fossil fuel used because of the increased efficiency of heat pumps and electric motors. Of course, such switching depends on each individual’s situation, including when such devices and services are due for replacement.

The Cloud

One calculation often ignored when talking about an individual’s carbon footprint is our use of the internet and smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. I’m not talking about the carbon emitted during the manufacture of these products, but the carbon emitted during their use. If you are using the internet to send and receive email, access social media, find or forward information or stream TV, you are using some of the over 3,350 data centres located around the world in over 70 countries, euphemistically referred to as “the cloud.” The cloud not only transmits gobs of data through its internet servers, but also stores the data files you save on your smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Every photo taken on your smartphone, file stored on your computer or email transmitted is most likely recorded somewhere in the cloud.

There are several issues with these data centres, many of which are environmental. First to come to mind, however, would be security. As a customer, you don’t really know who has your data, how it’s protected or in which country it is stored (for example, over 400 data centres are either situated in China or are owned by Chinese companies). You, willingly or not, trust the centres will protect your data. However, as stories in the news tell us nearly every day, there are many out there who would love to get their hands on your data and are continually working to do so.

At the top of the list of environmental issues are the tremendous amounts of energy used to keep these centres working. The centres are made up of hordes of servers, packed tightly together on tall racks in large warehouse structures. They are constantly uploading and downloading files of small and immense sizes. This consumes a lot of electricity and creates a lot of heat. That heat warms the air in the data centre and high temperatures can cause servers to crash. So, the data centres employ large-scale air-conditioning systems that cool the air in the warehouses. Air conditioners draw a lot of electricity and most of the electricity supplying these data centres is derived from the burning of fossil fuels, whether coal, oil or fossil gas.

Indeed, as Steven Gonzalez Monserrate has shown in his 2022 MIT case study (excerpted here in MIT Press Reader), the Cloud has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data centre consumes enough electricity to supply 50,000 homes.

If you are using a cloud service to store and protect your data or are storing posts and photographs on Facebook or Instagram, you expect to be able to retrieve that material at any time. In order to ensure that such retrieval is possible, the cloud services—through their data centres—have back-up copies made of your files and data, and placed on other servers in other centres. If one server or centre should fail, the backup of the file can be found elsewhere and transmitted to you. All of that work takes energy.

Server racks at a data centre. Photo by imgix on Unsplash

For example, as I write this piece on my desktop computer, the word-processing program automatically makes copies on my computer, and my computer simultaneously makes a copy in the cloud service I use. As long as I’m using that file, the file will stay recorded on my machine’s hard drive. But if I don’t access it for a while, it might be deleted in favor of opening up more disk space for other files or indeed a large program I want to use. If I want to use a file I haven’t accessed in a long time, say an article manuscript or a photograph, my computer will go into the cloud and download the file—again, using the servers and energy of a distant data centre.

Energy use and carbon footprints aren’t the only environmental issues. People who live near these data centres often complain about the constant noise coming from them—the steady hum from all the servers and air conditioners. As well, all the heat being expelled by the air-conditioning systems increases the ambient air temperatures in the neighborhood, contributing to urban heat island effects.

What Can Be Done?

As our use of the internet continues to expand in relation to our population growth, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) multiplies that demand many times, these data centres will continue to proliferate to supply the needed capacity. The internet and use of electronic data are so intertwined in our society that we’re not going to see any reduction in use any time soon.

Some centres are seeking to reduce their footprint by using water to cool their servers rather than air conditioners. Water is more efficient at transporting heat, so the systems use less energy than air conditioners. Other centres are seeking solar and wind energy alternatives to their use of fossil fuels. But is it enough?

There is a lot we can do as individuals to reduce our own contribution to the data centres’ and our own carbon footprints. For example, how many trash, trivial or actually useless files are stored in your cloud accounts? I’m thinking specifically of the many photographs and videos you most likely take with your smartphone. Those photos are high density and thus the files are very large. But have you noticed that your phone never gets full? That’s because the older files are being uploaded to and maintained in “the cloud.”

And yes, I’m just as guilty as the next person, maybe more so. As a writer, I rely on the internet to do my research and store my data. I keep digital copies of all the manuscripts I’ve written over the last many years. That used to mean copying them on Compact Disks that I’d store in my office. But with the advent of the cloud, CDs became obsolete. Now, my computer automatically uploads my files to the cloud. Many of those files I will never use again, but they’re being maintained by a bunch of servers of which I have no idea of their location or security.

The swift advancement of AI is also a cause for concern. If you are a user of social media or use devices created by Apple, Microsoft or Google, your data is being scraped up by each of those companies for use in their AI programs. Besides the obvious privacy concerns, these programs are using an immense amount of data online, inevitably causing the creation of more and more data centres.

In the days before the internet, we depended on ourselves to protect and secure our own digital data. If we failed to make a copy or backup copy of a file and the original became corrupted or lost, that was on us. We also had limited disk space so we made sure that old files no longer of use were deleted. Perhaps we should return to that frugal behavior and reduce the data going to the cloud. Who knows? We might even save some money when the cloud no longer asks us to purchase additional cloud space.