In October 2016, Marc-Andree Wolf of EURECA project partner maki Consulting GmbH presented a technical paper on “Environmental burdens of data centres – not only the use stage matters” in the 12th bi-annual Ecobalance conference 2016 in Kyoto, Japan (http://www.ecobalance2016.org/).
The aim of this paper is to present the environmental burdens (incl. but also beyond climate change) associated to data centres over their entire life cycle, i.e. the contributions also of production and end of life, beyond the often only considered energy consumption during the use stage. The results show that the production has a higher contribution than the use stage in several impacts, e.g. human toxicity, resource depletion, while the use stage dominates e.g. climate change impacts, primary energy consumption. The increased efficiency of the use stage and the trend of the data centre industry to purchase green energy is expected to further increase the shift towards production, as the relative relevance of production can be expected to consequently increase.
The presentation can be found here.