The Energy Managers Association (EMA) has called on the government to take action on the energy and carbon related costs resulting from legislation that requires companies to store vast quantities of data on remote servers.
Among the measures suggested by the EMA are proposals that the government should carry out mandatory carbon and energy impact assessments upon each piece of legislation put through the house, in an effort to calculate not only the energy cost to businesses, but also the effect on the UK’s carbon footprint.
“The EMA would like the government to start thinking more seriously about the energy cost of data and take steps to manage this cost,” a spokesman told Energy Demand.
Researchers working with the EMA are still assembling data on the exact cost of current legislation, but early results suggests that the electricity costs of data storage required under legislation from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Ministry of Justice are high enough to warrant concern.
The statement comes after EMA chief executive Lord Redesdale posed a question on the carbon and electricity costs of data retention to the House of Lords – pointing out that sending an e-mail with an attachment costs around 4g of carbon.
“If you scale that up for the amount of data that the government are asking to be retained over the next few years, the cost runs into the tens or hundreds of millions of pounds for each piece of legislation we pass,” he said. “This also causes a massive problem in the amount of electricity that is needed in data centres.”
He added: “This is a growing problem that does not seem to have been addressed by any government department.”
According to technology research company Gartner, which has looked into data retention costs, datacentres account for one quarter of the energy of consumed globally by the IT sector. Meanwhile, the power draw of data centres across the world is set to double over the coming decade.
But Bettina Tratz-Ryan, analyst at Gartner, told Energy Demand that the energy and carbon costs of storing data have actually gone down.
“Most storage technologies have become more cost efficient in the recent years, so energy consumption has decreased while the storage volume has increased,” she told Energy Demand. “Data management of stored data is a key area of efficiency to bring those costs, and the energy and related carbon emissions down.”
According to Tratz-Ryan, new mandatory carbon reporting regulations due to start this year in the UK will push larger companies to invest in the most energy efficient data technology.
“Data retention will incur incremental cost in data management and storage,” she said. “It will increase the carbon emissions for data storage, but this will not likely be a linear process. Data storage for compliance will be done mostly on efficient storage technology, in comparison to data that needs to be stored and available on a day to day basis.”