Will either not come forward or will come forward more slowly because of the cloud. Woman sings and how social media like this can be as bad for the planet as Long Distance flights. I think the danger is wejust keep everything. So theres data just building up and building up and building up. We all love using the cloud, but where is it . You see there is no facilities on the trail, its just pure nature all the way. So its just kind of woods, fjords and mountains . Yeah. The cloud is the vast network of computers that stores our data and helps make the internet work. And its hidden away in unlikely places. So you see that nature is changing now, theres less trees. The main thing you need to know about the cloud is its greedy. Wherever it goes, it needs vast amounts of power and water. If you were looking for the Perfect Place to put the cloud, you would struggle to find a better place than this. A norwegian Mountain Range fjords full of water and a Green Electricity supply. They power a
and what are the companies doing about power? well, some of them say they are already carbon neutral because of their use of renewable energy sources and offsetting. that s funding environmental projects like tree planting that balance out their emissions of carbon. we should all be very suspicious of these synthetic accounting exercises because often what they mean in paper is very different to what they mean in the real world. a lot of the industry are trying to do the right thing. a lot of the cloud infrastructure companies are building things like wind farms, they re building solarfarms. that s really positive and we should encourage that. but it doesn t mean that you re
creates greenhouse gases too. as a rough comparison, research suggests a five minute internet search uses around as much energy as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea. internet search is a really good example because an internet search relies on all the infrastructure, the part that s unseen. and the figures are contested. there is some uncertainty around them. but somewhere there s a machine that s doing all the analysis of the data and all the indexing, which allows the search to be then done rapidly. there s machinery under the surface doing that on your behalf, and each of that has a carbon cost. many in the industry say an online search is nowhere near as bad as boiling a kettle. but what s not disputed is our huge internet usage creates significant greenhouse gases. take our love of viral videos.
i think the big picture is that things do have to change. it s completely unsustainable to continue on this path of growth, growth, growth, and especially with data centres who use an awful lot of fossil fuel energy at the moment, as well as water. and those are very precious resources. for a new industry, the clouds impact in ireland has been remarkable. now there are more than 70 data centres, and they use ia% of the country s electricity. if the rise in data centres goes unchecked, then by 2030, 30% of all of ireland s power will go into the cloud. that would mean the cloud consuming about as much electricity as all households in ireland.
a villain s secret lair, but this is part of the cloud. welcome. thank you. it s quite a place! it is an amazing place. extraordinary. i m richard. pleased to meet you. welcome. nice to meet you as well. this bunker near stavanger was built to store weapons for nato. now it stores data. and you can hear the bustling above us. here is the high voltage transformers delivering power to the data centre. they like power, don t they, data centres? we. it s a power intensive industry. we need a lot of power. this is one of thousands of data centres around the world. i can feel the power! it sjust so much noise.