COLOCATION
“ Traditional construction methods involve multiple vendors and complicated engineering designs , which can take months to draw up ”
SANJAY KUMAR SAINANI GLOBAL SVP AND CTO , HUAWEI DIGITAL along the Colorado River with over 10 million sq ft of factory floor .
Why do data centres use so much energy ? According to the German statistics office , there are well over seven million data centres in the world , with the US in excess of 2,670 alone . They are followed by the UK with 452 , Germany with 443 , China , the Netherlands , Australia , Canada , France and Japan .
With vast amounts of electricity required to run their equipment , data centres also need a lot of it to keep the machines cool . Just how much electricity all these data centres use is up for debate .
We asked John Booth , Managing Director of Carbon3IT Ltd – an organisation that provides data centre support services such as ISO / IEC management standards , EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres ( Energy Efficiency ), sustainability and energy efficiency consultancy and training services – just how much energy is used for data centres in the UK .
“ The sad fact is that we don ’ t really know , because we don ’ t really know how many data centres there are , and this is because the term ' data centre ' means different things to different people . They can range from a cloud hyperscaler of 50MW , via colocation sites around 10MW , all the way down to what we call distributed IT , which can be as little as 50kW – a small server room . What we do know is that the data from the Climate Change Agreement for Data Centres 4th Period , was 3.8TWh , or about 1 % of the UK total electricity consumption .”
But Booth reiterates that this figure has to be treated with considerable caution , because it only covers the commercial data centres present in the UK , and even then , not all of them . For instance , it specifically excludes enterprise data centres , those that belong to business , government , academia etc .
“ Research conducted in 2017 by Carbon3IT Ltd after the CCA 2nd period suggests that this figure is woefully incorrect and that the actual energy usage for UK Data Centres is closer to 41TWh , almost 12 %. This is a truly alarming figure and , sooner or later , will need to
82 August 2022