Global leaders and environmentalists have a scheduled meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where the 28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations – COP28, will take place from November 30th to December 12th. The CEO of green4T, a Brazilian-based technology services company, Eduardo Marini, will participate in the panel “Sustainable Innovation for a Sustainable Future,” organised by Responding to Climate Change, a non-profit organisation that is an official Observer to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).The goal is to show how companies, organisations, and governments that rely on data processing for their activities can embark on an energy efficiency journey to reduce the environmental impact caused by data centre energy consumption.
Energy consumption in data centres
The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consume between 1 and 1.5% of all electrical energy produced globally in a year. In precise terms, 201 TWh, or 40.4% of all electricity consumed in Brazil in 2021. In worst-case scenarios, according to Swedish researcher Anders Andrae, the world’s data centres will consume approximately 20% of the world’s electrical energy, accounting for 5.5% of carbon emissions.The issue has entered the agenda of European governments. Last September, the German Parliament sanctioned the “Energy Efficiency Act,” a set of measures to reduce the consumption of electric energy in the country by 26.5% by the end of the decade, compared to 2008.
Sustainability and efficiency
green4T has been working to reduce energy consumption in data centres by up to 60%. Their proposed “efficiency journey” includes a series of steps from a data-driven approach to data centre management, through the renewal of hardware and equipment, as well as the optimisation of software applications. These combined actions substantially reduce the energy required for processing data workloads, making technology infrastructure “greener”. With the exponential growth in data generation fuelled by the rise of IoT and AI-based technologies, keeping technology infrastructure energy efficient will become a critical step for companies to achieve the sustainable goals set out by the Paris Agreement.
There’s plenty of other editorial on our sister site, Electronic Specifier! Or you can always join in the conversation by commenting below or visiting our LinkedIn page.