Our digital lives have a carbon footprint.

The energy consumed to power and cool the datacentres at the heart of ecommerce, online banking, social and streamed media, already emits as much greenhouse gas as the aviation industry. This figure is on track to grow to 8% of GHG emissions in 2025.

While hyperscale datacentre operators, including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, have made big strides towards adopting renewable energy sources, they still need fossil fuel-powered backup systems to meet the 24×7 demand for power and cooling.

Ballooning demand

Since the Paris Agreement, internet traffic has quadrupled and the average web page weight has increased by 85% on desktop and 165% on mobile.

Adding to this, the rapid adoption of generative AI is massively increasing datacentres’ computational load.

To meet the predicted 606 Terawatt hours of electricity needed to power datacentres by 2030, the government and tech firms have recommissioned three mothballed nuclear plants in the US, and major investment is going into building new nuclear plants.  However, building will take years and until then, fossil fuel combustion will continue.

How can we shrink our digital carbon footprint?

The good news is that we can all do our bit to lighten the load. Even turning off autoplay on our smartphones and turning down the screen brightness can contribute to an overall reduction in energy consumption on our digital devices.

Web designers and developers can do even more: making multiple optimisations that reduce web page weight and lower energy consumption and associated GHG emissions.

How we’re reducing digital carbon footprints

As the provider of the world’s most widely-used open-source content management system (CMS) built on Microsoft .NET, we have both a responsibility and a great opportunity to drive positive change on a larger scale.

For our own part, we’re focusing on ways to make our operations more sustainable and our software more energy-efficient. Running our CMS platform on Microsoft .NET9 has introduced features such as HybridCache that aid carbon-conscious web developers in building sites that load content more efficiently.

We’re also working closely with our global open-source community and digital agency partners to show how to reduce the CO2 emitted by business websites built on the Umbraco CMS platform. The Umbraco community Sustainability Team, formed in March 2023, has published documentation that provides practical steps for reducing web page weight and optimising data transmission.

Sharing responsibility and best practices

By sharing sustainable best practices, and the measurable ROI that our partners’ clients have achieved as a result of carbon-conscious web design, we hope to amplify these changes across the industry. Together we can make a much bigger difference to our collective carbon footprint.

Prominent members of our open-source community Sustainability Team worked with us and implemented the Green Web Foundation’s CO2.js tool. We now have a Sustainability Dashboard, which helps businesses monitor and reduce the environmental impact of their websites running on Umbraco Cloud.

Ten tips to reduce Cloud Carbon Footprint

Members of the Umbraco Sustainability Team have published the following practical steps that organisations can take, and free tools that they can use, to measurably reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of websites and digital experiences.

1. Lose weight

Just as the aviation industry has been introducing lighter aircraft to help reduce fuel consumption and emissions, carbon-conscious web designers can also help organisations to reduce web page weight.

The Sustainability Team recommends using tools such as www.Ecograder.com and www.Websitecarbon.com which show grams of CO2 emitted per web page. This is the simplest way to check a web page’s energy-efficiency in order to make improvements.

Neil Clark, Service Design Lead, at TPX Impact, observes, “Every piece of website software and code must minimise the data transfer it causes. We must start to consider data transfer as a constraint in all of our digital projects.”

Thomas Morris, Tech Lead at TPX Impact advises, “A useful first step is to set page weight budgets and stick to them. This helps to create a culture of optimisation with realistic targets. The HTTP Archive suggests a maximum of 1 Megabyte.”

2. Reduce Images

To reduce web page weight, Rick Butterfield, Lead Software Engineer at Wattle, emphasises, “Be ruthless about images.  Make sure they’re sized well and avoid using stock images, which can sometimes be massive files.”

Thomas Morris agrees, “One of the biggest impacts you can have, with fairly minimal effort, is to use appropriately-sized images on your website, or consider whether images are needed at all. Using modern image compression formats, such as WebP, or AVIF helps reduce file sizes by up to 70% compared to JPEGs, without your users noticing any difference. Optimise images before upload, to reduce the extra compute effort of resizing images. Where appropriate, consider using SVG icons, logos or illustrations, since these often result in smaller image file sizes and also scale easily without compromising image quality.”

3. Compress fonts

Thomas Morris advises, “We suggest using system fonts to reduce extra server requests. If you do have to use custom fonts then compression tools, such as WOFF2, will help to minimise the data weight of those assets. WOFF2 is supported across all modern browsers.”

Minimising text assets, including HTML documents, JavaScript files and CSS files is a really good practice. Google’s Brotli is a lossless compression tool supported by 96% of browsers that makes this a lot easier and reduces text-based files by around two thirds.

4. Choose colours wisely

Rick Butterfield advises that web designers can even reduce carbon footprint by changing the colours selected for a website: “Blue shades use up more energy than reds and greens when they’re displayed on screens.”

5. Default to Dark Mode

“Dark mode is very simple to set up and can be built on incrementally,” enthuses Rick Butterfield. As with a lot of the best practices outlined by the Sustainability Team, these changes benefit end users too. “A university study found that switching from light mode to dark mode at 100% screen brightness can save an average of 40% battery power, so users don’t have to charge devices as often,” adds Rick.

6. Keep software updated

James Hobbs, Head of Technology at aer Studios, says, “Simply by keeping libraries, frameworks and the rest, up to date, your organisation is likely to benefit from enhanced efficiency, which means doing more work with the same or fewer resources, which is better for the planet. When Umbraco moved to .NET Core it made a massive difference to the efficiency of the CMS. Staying on top of this can deliver sustainability and efficiency benefits and an improved security posture.”

7. Load web content efficiently

To make data transfers of images, videos and iframes more efficient, the Sustainability Team recommends implementing lazy loading on clients’ sites. “Lazy loading limits what is loaded within the viewport and is supported in modern browsers,” explains Thomas Morris.

However, web designers should avoid applying lazy loading to hero images which are always visible at the top of a page, as this will cause the website to load slowly and impact user experience.

8. Make your Site Carbon-Aware

Rick Butterfield is a strong advocate for building carbon-aware websites. “The Green Software Foundation’s Carbon Aware software development kit allows developers to create software that does more when the electricity is from renewable sources and less when the electricity is from fossil fuels. Open APIs allow us to create this type of service for clients. You could change your website’s functionality based on current grid usage, where your servers are located, or where your users are. As an example, if the server load is too high, the website can disable images, strip them back to display illustrations instead.”

9. Choose carbon-efficient infrastructure

Andy Eva-Dale, CTO at Tangent, advises that running digital services from the cloud has both environmental and financial benefits for organisations, “All the major cloud providers have carbon commitments. Take advantage of PAAS features like auto-scaling, to ensure you’re only using and paying for the computing memory you need, and this is optimised for ‘business as usual’ traffic, from a carbon perspective. Then, when you have spikes in traffic, we can auto-scale those applications. Furthermore, when we start looking at microservice architecture, we can scale independently and set resource plans on individual services rather than whole applications, giving us more control.”

Andy Eva-Dale continues, “The next thing to consider is serving content geographically close to your audience. Hosting static files or caching your API responses on the edge can significantly reduce the amount of carbon your systems produce.”

Thomas Morris agrees, saying, “Serving static assets via a content delivery network (CDN) will ensure that requests are treated efficiently.”

10. Switch off after use

Andy Eva-Dale also advises turning off cloud-based resources after use: “When you’ve moved to a relatively stable business as usual cycle, turn off your non-production environment and turn them on only when you need to make a patch, or update a particular feature. If you’re in a continuous programme of work, look at switching off environments at weekends. Applications like Kubernetes give you increased control over that. An auto event-driven autoscaler was announced by The Cloud Native Computing Foundation that allows infrastructure to be adjusted, based on carbon metrics.”

Taking our own advice:

The Sustainability Team has committed to sharing these best practices with peers, clients and even competitors. Together, we can reduce the environmental impact of digital experiences. This includes Umbraco listening to our digital partners and making the necessary changes to our core CMS platform and website.

Neil Clark comments: “By having us as a Sustainability Team, we can really push change at all levels of Umbraco which means that the impact of those changes is going to be amplified and not restricted to a few developers or agencies changing the way that they work.”

This is not just a nice-to-have. Our digital agency partners tell us they are seeing more client briefs and RFPs that stipulate sustainable web design. In the face of new legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, there is an increasingly strong business case for carbon-conscious web design.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has found its way onto the product roadmap of most companies, particularly over the past two years. Behind the scenes, this has created a parallel boom in the demand for data, and the infrastructure to store it, as we train and deploy AI models. But it has also created soaring levels of data waste, and a carbon footprint we cannot afford to ignore. 

In some ways, this isn’t surprising. The environmental impact of physical waste is easy to see and understand – landfills, polluted rivers and so on. But when it comes to data, the environmental impact is only now emerging. In turn, as we embrace AI we must also embrace new approaches to manage the carbon footprint of the training data we use. 

In the UK, NetApp’s research classes 41% of data as “unused or unwanted”. Poor data storage practices cost the private sector up to £3.7 billion each year. Rather than informing decisions that can help business leaders make their organisations more efficient and sustainable, this data simply takes up vast amounts of space across data centres in the UK, and worldwide. 

Uncovering the hidden footprint of data storage waste

To demonstrate the scale of the issue, it is estimated that by 2026, 211 zettabytes of data will have been pumped into the global datasphere, already costing businesses up to one third of their IT budgets to store and manage. At the same time, nearly 68% of the world’s data is never accessed or used after its creation. This is not only creating unnecessary emissions, but also means businesses are using their spending budget and emissions on storage and energy consumption when they simply don’t need to. Instead, that budget could be invested more effectively in developing innovative new products or hiring the best talent. 

Admittedly, this conundrum isn’t entirely new, as over 50% of IT providers acknowledge that this level of spending on data storage is unsustainable. And the sheer scale of the “data waste” problem is part of what makes it so daunting, as IT leaders are unsure where to begin. 

Better data management for a greener planet

To tackle these problems confidently, IT teams need digital tools that can help them manage the increasing volumes of data. It is important that organisations have the right infrastructure in place for CTOs and CIOs to feel confident in their leadership roles to implement important data management practices to reduce waste. Additionally, IT leaders also need visibility of all their data to ensure they comply with evolving data regulation standards. If they don’t, they could face fines and reputational damage. After all, who can trust a business if they can’t locate, retrieve, or validate data they hold – especially if it is their customer’s data?

This is why intelligent data management is a crucial starting point. Businesses on average are spending £213,000 per year in maintaining their data through storage. This number will likely rise considerably as businesses collect more and more data for operational, employee and customer analytics. So by developing a strategy and a framework to manage visibility, storage, and the retention of data, businesses can begin chipping away at the data waste issue before it becomes even more unwieldy. 

From there, organisations can implement processes to classify data, and remove duplications. At the same time, conducting regular audits can ensure that departments are adhering to the framework in place. And as a result, businesses will be able to operate more efficiently, profitably, and sustainably. 

While much of the conversation around the data centre industry’s environmental impact tends to focus on its (operational and embedded) carbon footprint, there’s another critical resource that data centres consume in addition to electricity: water.

Data centres consume a lot of water. Hyperscale data centres in particular, like those used to host cloud workloads (and, increasingly, generative AI applications) consume twice as much water as the average enterprise data centre.  

Server farming is thirsty work 

Data from Dgtl Infra suggests that, while the average retail colocation data centre consumes around 18,000 gallons of water per day (about the same as 51 households), a hyperscale facility like the ones operated by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), consumes an average of 550,000 gallons of water every day. 

This means that clusters of hyperscale data centres — in addition to placing remarkable strain on local power grids — drink up as much water as entire towns. In parts of the world where the climate crisis is making water increasingly scarce, local municipalities are increasingly being forced to choose between having enough water to fuel the local hyperscale facility or provide clean drinking water to their residents. In many poorer parts of the world, tech giants with deep pockets are winning out over the basic human rights of locals. And, as more and more cap-ex is thrown at generative AI (despite the fact the technology might not actually be very, uh, good), these facilities are consuming more energy and more water all the time, placing more and more stress on local water supplies. 

A report by the Financial Times in August found that water consumption across dozens of data centres in Virginia had risen by close to two-thirds since 2019. Facilities in the world’s largest data centre market consumed at least 1.85 billion gallons of water last year, according to records obtained by the Financial Times via freedom of information requests. Another study found that data centres operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta draw twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

AWS pledges water positivity in Santiago 

Earlier in 2024, AWS announced plans to build two new data centre facilities in Santiago, Chile, a city that has emerged in the past decade as the leading hub for the country’s tech industry. The facilities will be AWS’ first in Latin America. 

The announcement faced widespread protests from local residents and climate experts critical of AWS’ plans to build highly water-intensive facilities in one of the most water stressed regions in the world. Chile’s reservoirs — suffering from over a decade of climate-crisis-related drought — are drying up. The addition of more massive, thirsty data centres at a time when the country desperately needs all the water it can get has been widely protested. Shortly afterwards, AWS made a second announcement. This, on the face of it, wasan answer to the question: where will Chile get the water to power these new facilities? 

Amazon said it will invest in water conservation along the Maipo River — the main source of water for Santiago and the surrounding area. The company says it will partner with a water technology startup that helps farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. If successful, the plan will conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year. It’s part of AWS’ campaign, announced in 2022, to become “water positive” by 2030. 

Being “water positive” means conserving or replenishing more water than a company and its facilities uses. AWS isn’t the only hyperscaler to make such pledges; Microsoft made a similar one following local resistance to its facilities in the Netherlands, and Meta isn’t far behind. 

However, much like pledges to become “net zero” when it comes to carbon emissions, water positivity pledges are more complicated than hyperscalers’ websites would have you believe. 

“Water positive” — a convenient omission 

While it’s true that AWS and other hyperscalers have taken significant steps towards reducing the amount of water consumed at their facilities, the power plants providing electricity for these data centres are still consuming huge amounts of water. Many hyperscalers conveniently leave this detail out of their water usage calculations. 

“Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem,” argued a recent article published in Grist. As energy consumption continues to rise, the uncomfortable knock-on consumption effects will also rise, as even relatively water-sustainable operations like AWS continue to push local energy infrastructure to consumer more water to keep up with demand. 

AWS may be funding dozens of conservation projects in the areas where it builds facilities, but despite claiming to be 41% of the way to being “water positive”, the company is still not anywhere near accounting for the water consumed in the generation of electricity used to power its facilities. Even setting aside this glaring omission, AWS still only conserves 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons it consumes.    

Balancing supply and demand is critical to maintain a reliable electricity grid. Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) present an innovative and alternative solution, enabling local grid operators to use energy flexibility to ensure a more stable supply, improved energy efficiency and enhanced grid capacity.

The potential for virtual power plants

With the energy sector focusing more on renewable forms of energy and distributed energy resources (DER), VPPs are attracting more attention, able to deliver value to customers, and the potential to offer huge benefits to DER installers, grid operators and utilities.

Drawing on the capacities of a range of energy sources, such wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles, together with battery storage and other assets, the cost of implementing VPPs can be much lower when compared to traditional power plants. Controlled by grid operators or third-party aggregators, these energy resources can be monitored and optimised with bi-directional communications between components for a more efficient and resilient power grid.

Looking to a less carbon-intensive energy future, VPPs could play a key role in providing resource adequacy and other grid services at a negative net cost to the utility.

The global market for VPPs was expected to grow to $2.36 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%, according to the Virtual Power Plant Global Market Report 2023. Despite geopolitical issues, rising commodity prices and supply chain disruptions, the market is expected to reach $5.04 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 20.9%.

As a member-led industry alliance, we can see momentum shifting already. With major players in the VPP sector focusing on the adoption of advanced technologies and open standards, which is helping to drive growth. Partnerships will be key to this growth, as utilities and energy providers collaborate with technology companies and device manufacturers to turn homes, workplaces, and communities into virtual power plants.

Two companies, Swell Energy and SunPower, are playing their part in this transformative shift, having established VPPs that offer new value to utilities and their customers.

Making waves in Hawaii

Swell Energy creates VPPs by linking utilities, customers and third-party service providers together, and by aggregating and co-optimising DER through its software platform. The VPPs provide a variety of grid service capabilities through projects in Hawaii, California, and New York, so utilities can deliver cleaner energy to customers and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

The project in Hawaii, where Swell is working with Hawaiian Electric, represents a major advance in aggregated battery storage management technology. It will co-optimise batteries in 6,000 different homes to create a decentralised power plant for the local utility on three Islands. The program will deliver 80 megawatts hours of grid services using OpenADR-based integration, including capacity reduction, capacity build and fast frequency response to the three island grids, while also reducing bills and providing financial incentives for participating customers.

The VPP tackles several challenges, driven by Hawaiian Electric’s need for energy storage and renewable generation through DER, along with capacity and ancillary services to ensure adequate supply and system reliability across its service territory.

 Futureproofing energy supplies 

VPPs are also futureproofing energy supplies. Hawaii became the first US state to commit to generating 100% of its electricity from renewables by 2045, which means replacing fossil-fuelled plants with sustainable alternatives. While Hawaii has plentiful sunshine, grids can become saturated with solar production at midday, requiring batteries to store the surplus and make it available after the sun goes down.

Swell Energy will supplement Hawaiian Electric’s energy supply by relieving the grids of excess renewable energy as production spikes and absorbing excess energy when needed, reducing peak demand and providing 24/7 response to balance the grids. The renewable energy storage systems collectively respond to grid needs dynamically.

The model is a win-win. It provides homeowners with backup power and savings on their energy bills. At the same time, battery capacity is available to the utility to deal with the challenges of transitioning to a much cleaner energy source. This requires balancing grid needs while ensuring that customers are backed up and compensated. 

Rewarding customers in California

Global solar energy company SunPower’s VPP platform interfaces with utility DERMS platforms to ensure its customers’ SunVault storage systems are charging and discharging in line with the needs of the utility grid. The goal is to enroll customers in the program, dispatch according to the utility’s schedule, handle customer opt-outs and report performance data to the utility. As SunPower is a national installer, it must be able to communicate with dozens of utilities across the country.

The company also announced a partnership with OhmConnect to provide a new VPP offering for SunPower customers in California. Homeowners in selected locations with solar and SunVault battery storage can now connect with OhmConnect directly through the mySunPower app to earn rewards for managing their electricity use during times of peak demand. The idea being to make it as simple as possible for customers, putting them in full control of their energy use. 

The future potential of virtual power plants 

VPP programs like these demonstrate how to balance energy supply and demand on the network by adjusting or controlling the load during periods of peak demand, supporting the health of the grid, absorbing excess renewable energy, and much more.

Companies are already showcasing the potential capabilities of an advanced, distributed, and dispatchable energy future. But there are a relatively small number of initiatives globally. With the technology and communications standards to support it available, we need more opportunities like this to drive greater adoption and participant enrolment.

The timing has never been more important as we look ever more closely at an energy future that relies less on fossil fuels. With growing demands on the grid, especially in densely populated cities and with increasingly extreme weather events – VPPs offer an attractive solution. 

But it’s up to utilities, energy companies and partners to work together and embrace change, with governments supporting and driving change through regulation.

With over half of all corporate data held in the cloud as of 2022, demand for cloud storage has never been higher. This has triggered extreme energy consumption throughout the data centre industry, leading to hefty greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Worryingly, the European Commission now estimates that by 2030, EU data centre energy use will increase from 2.7% to 3.2% of the Union’s total demand. This would put the industry’s emissions almost on par with pollution from the EU’s international aviation.

Despite this, it must be remembered that cloud storage is still far more sustainable than the alternatives. 

Why should we consider cloud storage to be sustainable?

It’s important to put the energy used by cloud storage into context and consider the savings it can make elsewhere. Thanks to file storage and sharing services, teams can collaborate and work wherever they are, removing the need for large offices and everyday commuting.

As a result, businesses can downsize their workspaces as well as reduce the environmental impact caused by employees travelling. In fact, it’s estimated that working from home four days a week can reduce nitrogen dioxide emissions by around 10%. 

In addition, cloud storage reduces reliance on physical, on-premises servers. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), having on-site servers or their own data centres can be expensive, whilst running and cooling the equipment requires a lot of energy, which means more CO₂ emissions. 

Cloud servers, on the other hand, offer a more efficient alternative. Unlike on-premises servers that might only be used to a fraction of their capacity, cloud servers in data centres can be used much more effectively. They often operate at much higher capacities, thanks to virtualisation technology that allows a single physical server to act as multiple virtual ones. 

Each virtual server can be used by different businesses, meaning fewer physical units are needed overall. This means less energy is required to power and cool, leading to a reduction in overall emissions.

Furthermore, on-premises servers often have higher storage and computing capacity than needed just to handle occasional spikes in demand, which is an inefficient use of resources. Cloud data centres, by contrast, pool large amounts of equipment to manage these spikes more efficiently. 

In 2022, the average power usage effectiveness of data centres improved. This indicates that cloud providers are using energy more efficiently and helping companies reduce their carbon footprint with cloud storage.

A sustainable transition: three steps to create green cloud storage

Importantly, there are ways to further improve the sustainability of services like cloud storage, which could translate to energy savings of 30-50% through greening strategies. So, how can ordinary cloud storage be turned into green cloud storage? We believe there are three fundamental steps.

Firstly, businesses should carefully consider location. This means choosing a cloud storage provider that’s close to a power facility. This is because distance matters. If electricity travels a long way between generation and use, a proportion is lost. In addition, data centres located in cooler climates or underwater environments can cut down on the energy required for cooling.

Next, businesses should quiz green providers about what they’re doing to reduce their environmental impact. For example, powering their operations with wind, solar or biofuels minimises reliance on fossil fuels and so lowering GHG emissions. Some facilities will house large battery banks to store renewable energy and ensure a continuous, eco-friendly power supply.

Last but certainly not least, technology offers powerful ways to enhance the energy efficiency of cloud storage. Some providers have been investing in algorithms, software and hardware designed to optimise energy use. For example, introducing frequency scaling or AI and machine learning algorithms can significantly improve how data centres manage power consumption and cooling. 

For instance, Google’s use of its DeepMind AI has reduced its data centre cooling bill by 40% – a prime example of how intelligent systems can work towards greater sustainability. 

At a time when the world is warming up at an accelerating rate, selecting a cloud storage provider that demonstrates a clear commitment to sustainability can have a significant impact. In fact, major cloud providers like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have already taken steps to make their cloud services greener, such as by pledging to move to 100% renewable sources of energy.  

Cloud storage without the climate cost

The cloud’s impact on businesses is undeniable, but our digital growth risks an unsustainable future with serious environmental consequences. However, businesses shouldn’t have to choose between innovation and the planet.

The answer lies in green cloud storage. By embracing providers powered by renewable energy, efficient data centres, and innovative technologies, businesses can reap the cloud’s benefits without triggering a devastating energy tax. 

The time to act is now. Businesses have a responsibility to choose green cloud storage and be part of the solution, not the problem. By making the switch today, we can ensure the cloud remains a convenient sanctuary, not a climate change culprit.

Microsoft is partnering with UAE-based AI firm G42 on a major new data centre project in Kenya. The companies announced this week that they have committed to investing $1 billion in Kenya to support the nation’s digital economy and digital infrastructure. Building a “state of the art green data centre” is part of that package. Micsrofot identified the project as “one of the Kenyan investment priorities,” in a press release. 

The US tech giant has said the data centre will support the expansion of its cloud computing platform in East Africa. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion into the Abu Dhabi-based G42 in April in order to support the firm’s efforts to train an open-source large-language AI model in both Swahili and English.

Pivoting to Kenya (and away from Nigeria) 

So far, Microsoft’s data centre footprint in Africa has been restricted to two sites in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. The country will likely account for the majority of the $5 billion investment expected to enter the Africa data centre market by 2026. It already hosts the majority of the region’s data centre capacity. 

Looking to expand northwards into Sub-Saharan Africa, Microsoft initially looked as though it was gearing up to use Nigeria as its base in the region. However, last month, the company announced plans to shut down its Africa development centre located in Lagos, putting 200 people out of work. 

Now, it appears Microsoft is pivoting from Nigeria towards Kenya. The new facility, built by G42, will serve as the hub for Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa Cloud Region. Microsoft has announced plans for the site to come online in the next two years.

Additionally, Microsoft has pledged to bring last-mile wireless internet access to 20 million people in Kenya, and 50 million people across East Africa, by the end of 2025. The opening of an East Africa Innovation Lab in Kenya was also announced, and will presumably replace the one recently closed in Nigeria. 

Geothermal power in East Africa 

Beyond a statement that “Organisational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business,” Microsoft made little by way of explanation as to why it was shuttering its Nigerian business shortly before expanding in Kenya. However, one of the most likely reasons is the company’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its green ambitions with the growing demand for AI infrastructure. 

In Microsoft’s 2024 sustainability report, President Brad Smith and Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa highlighted the challenges the company faced due to the building of more datacenters and the associated embodied carbon in building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. 

WIth AI-infrastructure threatening Microsoft’s ambitions to become carbon neutral by 2030, the company may be looking for ways to cut the emissions in its infrastructure by building as green as possible. 

Nigeria, which has a power mix dominated by natural gas and biofuels, is nowhere near as renewables-focused compared with Kenya. By comparison, Kenya sources up to 91% of its energy from renewables. Its mix is 47% geothermal, 30% hydro, 12% wind and 2% solar. The country hopes to transition fully to renewables by the end of the decade. This is largely thanks to geothermal, which reportedly has the potential to increase capacity as high as 10,000MW, far exceeding peak demand in Kenya currently, which is about 2,000MW.

Abundant geothermal power undoubtedly played a role in Microsoft’s decision to refocus its East-African ambitions on Kenya. Microsoft claims the new data centre campus in Olkaria, Kenya, will run entirely on renewable geothermal energy. It will also be designed with state-of-the-art water conservation technology—another area where the company admitted it was struggling to meet sustainability targets in its report. 

Geothermal energy has long been among the most niche forms of renewable energy generation. Wind and sunlight affect (almost) every part of the globe. Geothermal energy, by contrast, has only been able to be captured in volcanic regions like Iceland, where boiling water rises through the earth to the surface. 

Until now, that is. New technologies and techniques developed over the past decade are transcending the traditional limitation of geothermal power generation. A new clutch of companies and government projects are making the next generation of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) look like a viable source of renewable energy at a time when the green transition is in need of new ways to cut down on fossil fuels.  

A rocky road for EGS

For nearly 50 years, the EGS projects have been working on a way to convert low permeability, hot formations into economically viable geothermal reservoirs. Governments in the US and Japan, among others, have invested significantly into EGS projects. However, most projects have had mixed results. 

Some projects failed to produce significantly higher energy yields. Others caused bigger problems. In 2017, an EGS plant in South Korea had to close down after likely causing a 5.5 magnitude earthquake as a result of fracking too close to a tectonic fault.

The most successful EGS projects have depended on expanding and stimulating large preexisting faults in the rock. This approach is not scalable, explains Mark McClure, founder of ResFrac, because “it relies on finding large faults in the subsurface.” While we aren’t exploiting anywhere near the number of usable faults, the number of fractures to exploit are finite, and finding them isn’t always easy. Despite companies in Germany like Herrenknecht developing novel solutions like “thumper trucks” that could drive around urban areas looking for geothermal faults, most experts agree the solution is finding ways to create new fault lines in the earth to access water warmed by the Earth’s core.  

Fervo’s Project Red and the next steps for geothermal  

In late April, Turboden, a company that makes advanced turbines for capturing geothermal energy, announced a new partnership with Fervo Energy. 

For Fervo, the partnership is part of the natural progression of a project that came online in November of 2023, but has been in the works for years. 

Located in the heart of the Nevada desert, Project Red is a new kind of geothermal power plant, one which uses a new approach to dramatically increase the amount of hot water and steam it can access in an area without naturally-occurring hot springs from volcanic activity.  

Fervo’s Project Red location in Nevada has seen remarkable success by harnessing techniques borrowed from the oil sector. By creating a 3000 ft lateral (sideways) extension to the bottom, the wells achieved by far the highest circulation rates ever circulated between EGS wells.

Drilling and fracking methods have grown increasingly sophisticated since the 2010s, thanks to the boom in oil and gas extraction from shale. The EGS sector has embraced these methods, and as a result, “the techniques that are central to EGS were perfected and brought down significantly in cost,” Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University told Knowable Magazine.

Nevertheless, Project Red is a relatively small demonstration of EGS’ potential. The station draws enough steam up from the earth to generate 3.5 megawatts of power. That’s enough to power more than 2,500 homes and more than any other EGS plant today. Nevertheless, it’s significantly smaller than nuclear or coal power plants can generate, and quite a bit less than solar, wind, and traditional geothermal sources. 

Now, however, Fervo plans to partner with companies like Turboden to rapidly scale up its technology. 

Scaling up Project Red

Situated in southwest Utah, Cape Station is positioned to redefine geothermal energy production with an anticipated total project capacity of approximately 400 MW. If successful, Fervo has claimed the project will represent a “transformative leap towards carbon-free energy solutions.”

The project will begin with an initial 90 MW phase. This includes the installation of three generators with six ORC turbines manufactured by Turboden.

“The success of Cape Station will not only validate the efficacy of EGS technology but also unlock vast potential for future geothermal power projects across the United States,” said the company in a statement.
One 2019 report projected that advances in EGS could result in geothermal power providing about 60 gigawatts of installed capacity to the US grid by 2050. That would account for 8.5% of the country’s electricity. Not only would this be more than 20 times the geothermal capacity of the US today, but the ability to plug up geothermal reservoirs and extract energy when needed could be used to complement more sizable but capricious wind and solar power. It’s just one more piece of the green transition puzzle.

Swarms of autonomous drones could be changing the face of agriculture in the US and beyond. In a landmark ruling, the American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently made an exemption to existing drone operation rules. The exemption allows Texan drone manufacturer Hylio to let a single pilot simultaneously fly up to three 165-pound AG-230 drones. Hylio’s pilots have clearance to fly multiple heavy drones beyond lone of sight, and can do so at night. The decision has been heralded as a major step forwards in industrial drone deployment.  

Industry experts believe this ruling could be a pivotal step in paving the way for “drone swarm farming”. While the ruling currently just applies to Hylio, it could soon be extended to the rest of the agri-drone industry. If so, it could put the technology competitive with traditional spraying and planting methods. 

While the FAA’s permission currently extends solely to Hylio pilots, the FAA is expected to generalise its approval through a “summary grant.”

“It’s definitely going to increase adoption of drones because you can’t just write drones off as cool for spot-spray,” says Arthur Erickson, Hylio CEO. “Now they’re a mainstay for farmers, even large row crop farmers.”

Drone demand soars in the agricultural sector

The agricultural drone market was worth about $1.85 billion in 2022. While drones used primarily to spray crops with pesticide and fertiliser have been met with some enthusiasm, FAA regulations have placed significant limitations on the scale and degree of autonomy with which drones can work in agriculture. 

Weight restrictions have, until now, limited drones flying beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) to 55 lbs(24.9kg). Also, the ratio of drones to pilots has been limited to 1:1. Technological limitations and regulatory guidelines have, therefore, allowed traditional agricultural methods to remain more effective. This could all be about to change, however. 

Erickson, in a recent interview, stressed the transformative impact of the FAA’s ruling on autonomous agriculture. “Swarming drones over 55 pounds has long been the desperately sought Holy Grail in the agricultural industry,” he explained.  

Growth in drone services-related revenue will likely stem from the rising adoption of drones in agriculture. In addition to the drones themselves, this will also necessicte a mixture of services. These could include drone operation, data analysis, customisation, and regulatory compliance assistance. 

The hardware segment dominated the market with a revenue share of about 51%. While hardware is expected to grow significantly over the coming decade, the software and especially services portion of the market is expected to register a significant CAGR over the forecast period.

Most farmers lack the necessary expertise to fully harness drone technology’s potential, which will boost demand for specialised services to enable effective drone utilisation and data interpretation. By 2030, the market for agricultural drones is predicted to exceed $10 billion. 

Ag-drones are paving the way for autonomous swarms in other sectors

If successful, Erickson argues that autonomous drone swarms in the agricultural sector could pave the way for their adoption in other industries. The agricultural sector is a relatively low-risk environment, with relatively little scope for injury in the event of an accident or error. As a result, Erickson argues that it makes an ideal testing ground for refining sensitive avoidance systems essential for the safe operation of autonomous drones. 

This could then pave the way for the broader adoption of drone swarms in other industrial sectors. Assuming they are proven safe and effective in a controlled environment like agriculture. 

However, manned crop spraying organisation, the National Agriculture Aviation Association, has raised concerns over the FAA’s ruling. The NAAA published an open letter raising safety concerns for manned crop-duster pilots. “UAS [unmanned aerial systems] performing the same mission in the same airspace present a significant hazard [to manned aeroplanes], particularly during seasonally busy application windows,” they warn.

When it comes to the worldwide green energy transition, data centres are certainly part of the problem. However, they could also be a part of the solution.

Part of the problem

Data centres have attracted their share of controversy and negative attention for their power consumption. 

Large data centres place enormous pressure on regional power grids. This has already driven some regional and national governments to freeze or outright ban construction. For example, the Irish government’s ban on connecting new data centres to Dublin’s electricity grid won’t end until 2028. Singapore and the Netherlands have also legislated to pause data centre construction. Both cited concerns over sustainability and the toll that multi-megawatt facilities take on their power grids. 

Data centres were early adopters of green energy, and have been drivers of sustainable engineering practices for over a decade. The “green” data centre market was worth $49.2 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $140.3 billion by 2026. However, the overall consumption of the industry is still rising. It’s also expected to rise a great deal more, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that data centres, which consumed 460TWh in 2022, could use more than 1,000TWh by 2026. Responsibility for this explosion of demand can be largely laid at the feet of the ongoing AI boom. 

High intensity workloads like artificial intelligence are accelerating the growth of data centre power demand, and the world may not be able to keep up. This is especially problematic as the global drive towards a green energy transition picks up steam.

“We have many grids around the world that cannot handle these AI [driven] workloads,” Hiral Patel, head of sustainable and thematic research at Barclays, said in an interview with the Financial Times. Going forward, she added that “data centre operators and tech companies will have to play a more active role in the grid.”

Power grids in crisis

One of the main problems faced by governments trying to restructure their energy mix is intermittent power generation. Wind and solar power can create abundant, cheap electricity. Not only that, but manufacturing wind and solar infrastructure is getting quicker and cheaper. As a result, large-scale engineering projects are increasingly putting more wind and solar energy into energy grids. 

However, there’s a problem with these methods of electricity generation. Essentially, when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun goes down (or behind a cloud), the power turns off. Battery technology also hasn’t evolved to a point where it’s practical (or possible, really) to store enough energy to tide the grid over when solar and wind fall short.

Currently, natural gas, coal, and other fossil fuels are used as a stopgap. These fuels are used to support energy grids when demand outstrips what renewables can supply. Nuclear is increasingly recognised as the best, cleanest source of consistent complementary power to support intermittent renewables. However, nuclear infrastructure takes a long time to build. Not only this, but regulation moves slowly. Most debilitatingly, nuclear power is still lumbered with an image problem—something the fossil fuel industry has worked hard to stoke over the past several decades. 

Add an unsteady energy transition to the fact that the power grids in many developed and developing nations are ageing, poorly maintained, and overloaded, and you have a  

In the meantime, data centres could offer part of the solution to power grids that lack resilience. 

Data centres must take on “a more active role in the grid”

All data centres have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) of some sort. All critical infrastructure does, from hospitals to government buildings. It’s a fancy term for a backup generator. 

If the grid fails, the UPS kicks in and can keep the lights (and servers) on until service is resumed. Data centre UPS systems are of special interest here because of the sheer volume of energy they can provide. 

These facilities are equipped with a very large array of either lead-acid or lithium-ion batteries. This array will be sized to the IT load of the data centre, meaning a 500 MW facility is equipped with enough batteries to power your average town—for a while at least. Most data centres aren’t that big, but there are a lot of them. 

Some experts argue that there are enough data centres (especially big ones) with enough power constantly being stored in high battery arrays that they have the capacity to return power to the grid, sharing the load when the system as a whole comes under strain. This substantial energy storage capacity is often underutilised. 

“As the transition to renewable energy accelerates, maintaining a stable grid is paramount. Data centre operators can have a crucial role to play in grid balancing,” argues Michael Sagar of lead-acid battery manufacturer EnerSys. By feeding power back into the grid to support it in moments of overwhelming demand, he explains that “data centres can contribute to grid stability and potentially generate additional revenue.”

Click HERE to read part one of this two-part series on the need for green data centres and the obstacles standing between the industry and true decarbonisation. 

The “green data centre” doesn’t go far enough. Until now, access to renewable energy, water and power efficiency, and use of techniques like free cooling have been enough to qualify a data centre as sustainable. Low PUE and net-positive water usage have allowed data centre operators to advertise their ESG bonafides. 

However, some industry experts argue that these metrics are out of step with the industry’s very real and present need for more meaningful emissions reductions. “There is no truly green data centre until we achieve deep decarbonisation,” says Helen Munro, Head of Environment & Sustainability at Pulsant. “It’s important to recognise that this is a journey right now, and not a reality.” 

What makes a green data centre? 

“It’s often assumed that the greenest data centres are new builds. A new build can be designed to be as efficient and self-sufficient as possible, reducing the reliance on external power sources and promoting energy efficiency,” Munro explains. 

However, there’s a problem with building new infrastructure. No matter how energy efficient your data centre is, construction is an inescapably carbon-intensive activity. “We need to balance the efficiency gains of a new building with that impact and consider the improvements that we can make to existing assets,” she argues. 

There’s already some effort in the industry to lengthen upgrade cycles. Google (along with other hyperscalers) has started using its servers and IT equipment for significantly longer amounts of time. Between 2021 and early 2023, the company extended the lifespan of hardware like servers from four to six years. The move, in addition to saving Google as much as $3.4 billion per year, reduces the amount of e-waste considerably.   

The site selection question 

Where you put a data centre also has a meaningful impact on its environmental impact. Powered by local energy sources, plugged into a local grid, drawing water from the local supply, and built using local materials, codes and techniques. Regional power grids often have very different carbon intensities. “Data centres in areas of the Nordics, for example, are benefitting significantly from high availability of renewable power, as well as cooler climates which facilitate lower infrastructure power consumption,” Munro adds. “A well-sited data centre can also feed into local district heat networks, thereby avoiding emissions.” 

Optimising data centre location requires compromise on climate

However,the problem is that we can’t put all our data centres in Norway. Increasingly, as artificial intelligence, IoT and 5G increase localised computing, there’s more demand for lower latency connections. “It can be important for clients to have access to a data centre which is local to them,” says Munro. She adds that “data centres with a local focus should fall back on buying power in the greenest way they can; recognising that approaches such as physical PPAs can give stronger renewable power additionality than a 100% renewable tariff and be ready to engage with opportunities such as heat networks when they become locally feasible.”  

In short, there are many factors that affect a data centre’s sustainability that lie outiside the direct control of the company that builds it.  These factors include “not only the local power grid and climate, but the impacts of the upstream supply chain for infrastructure, hardware and services,” Munro explains. She emphasises how critical it is that organisations committed to building and operating greener data centres “develop a robust plan to maximise their positive influence and recognise that no site can be entirely sustainable unless the wider ecosystem is, too.”

Specifically, she adds that “Organisations should also ensure their concept of ‘sustainability’ includes the impacts beyond their site boundaries, and goes beyond only the carbon footprint.” Munro points out that hydrated vegetable oil (HVO) fuel can result in emissions reductions, its production has also been linked to an increased risk of deforestation. “Focusing on environmental sustainability beyond reducing carbon emissions and involving initiatives to protect local ecosystems and wildlife, will help organisations reinforce their focus on becoming greener,” she notes.

Where do we go from here? 

Is the green data centre a myth, then? Can data centre companies—even those taking a holistic view of their entire environmental impact—actually build facilities that have a light enough environmental footprint to avoid contributing to the climate crisis? 

Munro argues that “We need to consider efficiency in relation to the value of the computing workloads” that data centres host. She argues that “organisations generate and store huge amounts of data every day that is of little-to-no-value to them; so even using the greenest of data centres, this is a waste of power and hardware resources.”  

It’s a complex issue with no easy solution. However, the first step is changing the conversation around what constitutes a green data centre. Operational efficiency is no longer enough to call a data centre green. The entire project, including its impact up and down the supply chain, needs to be considered holistically if meaningful steps are to be taken to reduce environmental impact. 
A recent report by the World Bank argues that “Addressing the climate footprint of data centres requires a holistic approach, including design, manufacturing, procurement, operations, reuse, recycling, and e-waste disposal. Beyond increasing energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions, these steps can reduce e-waste and limit the data centre’s environmental footprint throughout the data centre lifecycle.”

The data centre’s role in the fight against climate change is an uncertain one. Globally, data centres consume between 1-1.5% of all electricity, according to data collected by the International Energy Agency (IEA). In 2022, data centres used approximately 460TWh of electricity. They also accounted for 3.5% of the global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the global aviation industry. 

This may sound bad, but the industry’s emissions figures and electricity consumption are actually something of a miracle. As the IEA notes, emissions from data have “grown only modestly despite rapidly growing demand for digital services,” since 2010. They credit energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy purchases, and the broader decarbonisation of electricity grids around the world. 

However, curtailing emissions growth through increased efficiency and renewable power purchase agreements is insufficient. Not only is demand for data centre capacity set to more than double by 2026 (exceeding 1000TWh) thanks to AI, but the IEA suggests that “to get on track with the Net Zero Scenario, [data centre] emissions must drop by half by 2030.” 

Data centre freezes are insufficient

With trillion of dollars in economic impact at stake, it’s highly unlikely data centre growth will be curtailed. 

Some countries, including Singapore, Ireland, and the Netherlands, have stepped in to regulate growth and even freeze their data centre industries, as the burden of massive hyperscale facilities on their nations’ power and water supplies begins to outweigh their economic benefits. One fifth of Irelan’s electricity was consumed by data centres in 2022. By 2026, it will rise to one third of the country’s energy consumption. In response, Ireland’s national electricity utility stepped in and, in May of 2022, effectively banned data centre construction in Dublin. 

However, regulating on a national or regional level like this only pushes demand elsewhere. The Dublin moratorium is a demonstration of this problem in miniature. Just six months after the moratorium took effect, there were 21 new facilities in the works outside the Dublin area. Many of them “as close to the capital as possible, roughly 80 km away at sites in Louth, Meath, Kildare, Kilkenny, and Wicklow.” 

The same process is being replicated at different scales around the world. Data centre capacity in aggregate isn’t going anywhere but up. The problem is holistic, and therefore the solution should be too. 

The fight for green digital infrastructure

The need for data centre infrastructure that consumes less power, less water, and has a reduced impact on both the local area and global emissions is gaining real traction. 

A report by the World Bank notes that while “Reliable, secure data hosting solutions are becoming increasingly important to support everyday functions across societies,” in order to “ensure sustainable digital transformation, efforts are needed to green digital infrastructure.” 

However, building data centres that are more energy efficient is only half the battle. 

“There is no truly green data centre until we achieve deep decarbonisation,” says Helen Munro, Head of Environment & Sustainability at Pulsant. Only when the industry “embeds respect for nature and resources,” at the site level, throughout the hardware supply chain, the infrastructure, construction process, and throughout supporting power utilities will there ever be such a thing as a “green data centre”. 

CONTINUES IN PART TWO.