Abstract
Climate change is recognised as one of the key challenges humankind is facing. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector including data centres generates up to 2% of the global CO2 emissions, a number on par to the aviation sector contribution, and data centres are estimated to have the fastest growing carbon footprint from across the whole ICT sector, mainly due to technological advances such as the cloud computing and the rapid growth of the use of Internet services. There are no recent estimations of the total energy consumption of the European data centre and of their energy efficiency. The aim of this paper is to evaluate, analyse and present the current trends in energy consumption and efficiency in data centres in the European Union using the data submitted by companies participating in the European Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency programme, a voluntary initiative created in 2008 in response to the increasing energy consumption in data centres and the need to reduce the related environmental, economic and energy supply security impacts. The analysis shows that the average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of the facilities participating in the programme is declining year after year. This confirms that voluntary approaches could be effective in addressing climate and energy issue.
Highlights
Climate change is recognised as one of the key challenges humankind is facing
The analysis shows that the average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of the facilities participating in the programme is declining year after year
The recent international Paris agreement aims at limiting the temperature increase to no more than 2 ◦ C compared to the period before the industrial revolution [1]
Summary
Climate change is recognised as one of the key challenges humankind is facing. Among the measures to mitigate the impact of climate change, energy efficiency is highlighted as a key component [2]. In addition to mitigation of CO2 emissions, energy efficiency will reduce the energy consumption compared to a “business as usual”. Energy efficiency is a key part of the European energy policies and the 2020 and 2030 energy and climate targets include a specific part for energy efficiency [4]. In the EU, as well as in other major economies, policies and measures have been introduced to improve energy efficiency in every sector of the economy, including ICT and data centres [5]
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