Temperature rises as a result of climate change directly affect technology. With data centers on which the proper functioning of remote servers depends, when the heat rises it costs more to keep them properly cooled and failures can occur that will affect their performance.
Data center cooling is the largest electrical energy cost of data center maintenance.
The highest maintenance cost of data centers is precisely the cooling of equipment, which is why some companies choose to install them in locations with low temperatures. And that is also why rising temperatures around the world mean that data center facilities themselves suffer from the increased heat in the environment that they have to combat.
The problem comes when the cooling installations are overwhelmed, the heat is higher than the average temperatures that were taken into account when they were designed, and the system is unable to lower the temperature The system is unable to lower the temperature at which the equipment is working, which interrupts its operation due to overheating protection systems. As a result, various online services are interrupted.
Last September the thermometers in the United States set record temperatures that forced the authorities to recommend that citizens stay indoors to stay safe from the heat, and one of the effects was that there were massive failures of facilities such as those of Twitter in different regions, from Oregon to Atlanta, which were forced to close, with the consequent damage to the experience of millions of users in those areas who suffered interruptions and slowdowns in the operation of the social network.
The same thing happened last summer in London where the heat also forced the closure of Google and Oracle facilities in the face of high temperatures, a situation that as long as global warming is not curbed could become commonplace. This scenario would be added to the power outages that also occur during the summer in those areas where the electricity demand due to the use of domestic air conditioning equipment exceeds the capacity of the power grids, causing blackouts. Power cuts also complicate the operation of data centers, despite the fact that most of them have emergency power supply systems, such as generators.
According to data provided by the International Energy Agency, it is estimated that. 1 % of total global electricity demand comes from data centers.This percentage has remained stable over the last decade thanks to advances in equipment efficiency, but now the problem is one of energy availability due to climate change. To address this possibility, many companies are betting on renewable energies such as solar and wind power, which allow cost reductions in addition to reducing pollution and carbon footprint.
Another alternative is being put into practice in countries such as Finland and Sweden, where they are used for data centers locations with a low ambient temperatureso that the cooling requirements are lower. But since not all data centers can be located in the Arctic Circle, the vast majority need to be located in close proximity to large urban concentrations and business centers, from New York’s Manhattan or the City of London to Tokyo or Shanghai for even faster data access.
In other cases companies such as Amazon or Google may select for their data centers sites with access to less expensive energy, Microsoft has tried submerging them under water and Facebook has in some cases opted to harness the heat coming from the data centers to provide heating to nearby homes. from one of its facilities in Denmark, and Amazon dumps the water that cools one of its data centers in Oregon into a canal for irrigation of adjacent farms.
Quite different is the option adopted by companies such as Apple and Samsung, which last year undertook initiatives of massive tree plantingsthe most efficient method of combating climate change by capturing CO2 and transforming it into oxygen. In the case of the Californian company it will be in India and the South Korean company chose Madagascar.
