As the world goes digital, datacenters that make the cloud work look to renewable energy sources
Two seismic shifts in society are happening at the same time: The digitization of nearly everything, in what some call the fourth industrial revolution, and a move toward renewable energy driven by the climate crisis and other world events. At the confluence of these movements are thousands of datacenters operating around the clock to support a wide spectrum of critical services. When people refer to the cloud, they are really talking about the data in datacenters. These are real, on-the-ground places: buildings that house banks of computer processing units, humming with our work, our research, our play, the stories of our lives and the road maps to our futures. While the energy datacenters use accounts for about 1% of all electricity consumed globally , the influence they’ve had on the shift to renewable, sustainable sources of energy is disproportionately large. Some of the impact has been direct and tangible, and some is indirect and harder to gauge. “Energy use by lea