Here at the Middle America Project, we focus on a range of issue areas, so when we find something that covers tech, climate change, infrastructure, AND innovation, we start geeking out. Queue up: how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting personal energy consumption and how our nation’s digital infrastructure is threatened by COVID-19.
While most Americans are currently working from home, you likely do not think about your carbon footprint when streaming your favorite show while adjusting the room temperature via an app and checking your email. But if you were to go a step further down the value chain to think about how all of that cloud and “internet of things” activity connects to the source managing that data, well, you would be surprised by what you find. While overall energy consumption during the pandemic is down, it’s not as steep a drop as expected. One of the reasons? Data centers.
Photo courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, 2016.
What is a data center? It’s a physical facility used by organizations to store, process, and disseminate the data from their servers. Imagine the weird IT room in your office you never dare enter, the one with the hulking machine with blinking lights. Now imagine warehouses full of them.
According to Forbes magazine, in 2017, US based data centers alone used up more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity which requires 34 giant (500 megawatt) coal-powered plants. That number is expected to double by 2021. For comparison, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average U.S. residential customer uses around 11,000 kWh per year. For a more physical example, Microsoft’s Quincy, Washington data center utilizes 24,000 miles of network cable, which is the equivalent of six Amazon Rivers.
Think of data centers almost like landfills – a solution designed to process and store things that ends up using a ton of energy. The difference is data centers don’t just store waste, they store all the currently in-use invisible digital information flying around us: emails, websites, photos, etc.
It’s natural that most of us might not think about the correlation between our digital habits and energy consumption, but here’s why we should: The electricity (mostly dirty coal) needed to feed these centers is enormously expensive and inefficient. Luckily, leading tech companies are getting innovative with data centers.
Apple, for example, has been at the forefront of the tech revolution with data center construction to meet the need for demand. Facebook is making moves too – including building a server farm 70 miles from the Arctic Circle in Sweden that is 10 percent more efficient and uses almost 40 percent less power than traditional data centers. Another efficiency of Facebook’s design is such that only a single technician is needed to keep an eye on as many as 25,000 servers at once. In 2018, Microsoft took things a step further toward more sustainable storage by sinking a data center hundreds of feet in the Pacific Ocean, known as Project Natick.
Photo courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, 2016.
So how does COVID-19 impact our data infrastructure? For starters, there is growing concern about how long these data centers can continue running if there is sustained supply chain disruption. Since they are considered mission critical infrastructure, most data centers have enough supplies to weather this particular storm for six months as a standard operating procedure, but if the pandemic continues beyond that, according to the Data Center Knowledge site, we may be looking at some very unwanted disruption.
Data centers are often outsourced to other countries as part of our globalized, interconnected information sharing infrastructure. The centers take maintenance, require repairs and replacement parts, and are susceptible to supply chain shocks like any other industry. Tech experts say that the longer states and countries remain locked down, the more we wade into uncharted waters with the maintenance of these data centers. In other words – if a data center fails, any company or organization using it is faced with the possibility they won’t be able to perform core parts of their business.
Then there is the energy consumption – it’s not quite accurate to say our collective digital energy consumption has gone down much from mass quarantining. As long as we’re going about our digital lives (work and personal), we’re contributing to industrial scale data storage that is majority powered by fossil fuels.
As COVID-19 continues disrupting our lives, our ability to digitally stay connected is more often than not dependent on data centers. Protecting, strengthening, and innovating this infrastructure is paramount to not only existing in our current situation, but also thriving afterward.