Due to the downturn in the economy, businessmen and professionals are searching for increased efficiency and reduced costs in their tasks. This is particularly valid for the ever-increasing cost and risk related to information technology organizations. Today the business world is burdened with huge IT infrastructure and because of this the demand for “cloud computing services” is increasing. Cloud which some are calling “the factory of the 21st century” is a type of computing that depends on sharing a pool of resources, rather than owning local or personal hardware and software. The cloud infrastructure is run by a network of IT service companies, Internet service providers, and telecommunication firms and allows for the automatic sharing of resources, based on the demand. It thus ensures that the level of resources available is as closely matched to the current demand as possible. This makes the differentiation from other computing models where the resource is provided in individual servers usually with fixed capacities and upfront costs. We believe that cloud computing while it has the potential to create new sustainability, creates also ethical dilemmas. Addressing these dilemmas calls for a rethink on how we approach corporate responsibility and must confront ethical issues.
Cloud computing and storage business is a fast-growing industry that helps drive business needs. The instant access to real-time information provided by the Internet and cloud computing is powerful and is necessary for business decision-making. There is a shift to the digitization and global delivery of entertainment and media via services such as Google, iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. By 2025 the size of the digital world is predicted to reach up to 181 zeta bytes from the present capacity of 97 zeta bytes. This voluminous size is due to the large volume of digitized data generated by our YouTube videos, Facebook status updates, e-Mail messages, iTunes downloads, and other data services. In addition to this, there are expected to be more than 64 billion IoT devices worldwide by 2025. The data centres that house this eruption of digital information, currently consume approximately 2.5% to 3.0% of global electricity and are growing at a rate of approximately 12% annually. Generally, this increasing power demand is fulfilled by using fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. The electricity generated by fossil fuels provides a large source of power for a country and releases tons of greenhouse gases. So basically, having cloud computing is good, but due to these inexpensive sources of electricity, it leaves a very dirty carbon footprint.
The power consumption of data centres that provide power to social media, streaming video, cloud computing, and connected devices is of the order of 631 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity – in 2007 and this consumption is still growing rapidly. The Swedish researcher Andres Andrae expects the ICT industry power demand to increase from 200 – 300 terawatt-hours (TWH) of electricity a year now, to 1200 or even 3000 TWH by 2025, and associated CO2 equivalent emission would reach 1.9Giga tons. This is mainly due to the requirements of 21st-century digital infrastructure powered by fossil fuels that are largely responsible for the catastrophic levels of CO2 emission. Just a 500MW coal-fired thermal power plant produces approximately 3 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. According to the Greenpeace report, IT-related services now account for 5.5% of all global carbon emissions.
This global demand for dirty energy has a catastrophic impact on human beings, flora and fauna, and the global environment. As the demand increases, so does the size of the problems such as haze, air pollution, oil spills, nuclear accidents, and widespread ill-effects to our health from pollution. The worst crisis of them all is climate change. The computing cloud may look intangible to users, but it has a definite physical form and a corresponding carbon footprint. In one of the studies, it is stated that Facebook datacentres for example were responsible for the emission of 298,000 metric tons of CO2 in 2012, the equivalent to roughly 55000 cars on the road.
The amount of carbon emitted to generate the energy consumed by cloud or data centres depends on the mix of primary energy sources like coal, nuclear and natural gasses, etc., and transmission losses. The carbon emission factor is a measurement of the carbon intensity of these energy sources. However, the tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere, wherever it is produced; affect the climate irrespective of the regional or political borders. It is the responsibility of data centres and cloud services to monitor CO2 emissions and track actual emissions to take an institutional corrective mechanism. Drawing clean electricity generated from renewable energy sources like solar energy can result in a smaller carbon footprint. As a corporate social responsibility, IT organizations must encourage the use of green power. The most efficient use of renewable power generated on-site can have the largest effect on reducing such a footprint today. This also provides better protection against electricity price volatility and in increasing energy security, in addition to doing what is right for the environment. The ethical thunderstorm that can suppress the increasing carbon footprint looks like the carbon currency of the future.
Dr. Rathnakar Achary
Associate Professor
Alliance College of Engineering and Design