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The clouds of drought are not only in the sky. Although we live waiting for it to rain after many months without heavy rainfall, we are not aware that, in this digital age, the cloud, the massive storage of data in the cloud, impacts the climate and the water cycle.
I have interpreted with the reflection technique for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos the current drought that we are experiencing, especially in Catalonia, and putting this situation in relation to the phenomenon of the data cloud.
To give us an idea, data centers in the United States consume at least 3.8 million liters of water every day, even in arid areas, according to the specialized publication Cloud Computing Magazine.
And if you look at cryptocurrency mining centers, they consume an enormous amount of energy (in 2021 alone, this activity required more electrical energy than entire countries like Norway).
The need to cool servers to avoid overheating implies the direct consumption of water. Thus, according to a study carried out by David Mytton, from the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, published in the journal Nature, in some cases up to 57% of that required water is also drinkable.
“Data centers consume water directly for cooling, in some cases 57% coming from drinking water, and indirectly through the water requirements of non-renewable electricity generation,” details Mytton.
Cloud storage is based on computer networks. It was designed in the 1960s, but today there are already thousands of warehouse computers dissipating heat in the same space, requiring enormous spending on cooling. Air conditioning can account for up to 40% of the energy consumption of these centers, according to a report by Ana Freire, director of the academic department of Operations, Technology and Science and expert in Artificial Intelligence at the UPF Barcelona School of Management.
The truth is that the water consumption of these large data centers has been taboo for a long time, a secret that was not wanted to be shared, until, with climate change, criticism came.
In the Netherlands, for example, the province of North Holland is at risk of drinking water shortages due to excessive consumption by data centers.
To be aware of the size of this large storage cloud, Google alone places data centers in more than 20 locations distributed throughout the planet. There are different examples of systems that we use in our daily lives, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Amazon Web Services, Onedrive, Terabox, Mega, Icedrive, Telegram Web or Degoo.
But, demand continues to increase. And it doesn’t seem to have a limit. If on a global scale the sum of computing capacities grows at 21% annually, in Spain, the average rate until 2026 will be 42% in Madrid and 52% in Barcelona and its respective metropolitan areas.
The information and communications technology sector will see enormous growth in the coming years: there are expected to be 29.3 billion devices online by 2030, up from 18.4 billion in 2018. Data centers have been built around the world to provide the millions of servers they contain access to power, cooling and Internet connectivity.
“Although data center water consumption in the US (1.7 billion liters/day) is small compared to total water consumption (1,218 billion liters/day), there are issues of transparency, as less than a third of data center operators measure water consumption,” notes researcher David Mytton.
But, at the level of energy savings, the question is also why not start taking advantage of the heat generated in these large data storage centers instead of losing it by throwing it into the atmosphere.
