Sustainable Electronics
The need for greater sustainability in the communications industry
By Vanesa Alias, VP product management at HUBER+SUHNER A
cross the globe, policymakers, governments, and businesses continue to roll out policies and initiatives focusing on sustainability. Back in 2019, the
European Commission published its ‘European Green Deal,’ (1)
which set out plans to make Europe climate neutral by 2050.
In response, a number of data centre-related stakeholders and trade associations signed up to the ‘Climate Neutral Data Center Pact’ in 2020. This initiative indicated five key areas for improvement that the industry needed to make if it wanted to achieve neutrality by 2030. As part of this initiative, the electricity demand for data centres must be matched by 75 per cent renewable energy, or hourly carbon-free energy (2)
, by December 31, 2025.
In Germany, an energy efficiency law(3) that came into force in November 2023 has introduced further clean energy targets for businesses. From this year, data centres across the country must now cover at least 50 per cent of their energy use with renewable energy, rising to 100 per cent by 2027. Against this backdrop, the need for greater sustainability in network operations is clear.
Building eco-friendly facilities Building sustainability principles into new data centres is easier than retrofitting them to existing infrastructure, even if there will now be a range of environmental regulations set at local and regional levels that a business must comply with. This places a lot of pressure on businesses when selecting the location of their new data centre.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centre energy usage rose between 20 and 40 per cent annually (4) between 2010 and 2022, mostly owing to the need to prevent overheating. The use of natural cooling methods can help replace energy-intensive cooling systems, especially if it is possible to locate a data centre in a cooler climate. This means data centres need to tap into local grid systems that incorporate
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renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to enable these methods and reduce the carbon footprint of operations. Businesses must also consider transportation as a factor too, not just of supplies but of their workforces as well. Choosing a location with solid local transportation systems can help reduce environmental impact, and if the centre is close to the end-users, they can achieve lower energy consumption when it comes to the transmission of data.
Selecting the right components Once the data centre is under construction, sustainability concerns then turn towards
Components in Electronics
the components set to be used within the facility. In every data centre, you’ll find the same essential components—routers, servers, switches, firewalls, and storage systems, for example. When choosing components, variables such as energy and water efficiency, waste minimalization, and the materials used are becoming as important considerations as performance measures.
As a result, operators are increasingly looking at their supply chain and selecting products that have been made more sustainably. At the same time, there are not-for-profit organisations such as the Green Software Foundation (GSF) dedicated to building a trusted ecosystem for greener,
low-carbon software, which can then be used to support the management of on-premise data centres (5)
. Both of these approaches
demonstrate a comprehensive approach to addressing energy consumption and carbon emissions throughout a data centre’s lifecycle.
A greener future for network infrastructure
Can all these initiatives and projects lead to truly net-zero network infrastructure? It will certainly be a challenge, and there are a number of key considerations and strategies businesses must consider in order to reach that goal. The adoption of technologies that can increase the
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