Hidden power

By Claire Thirlwall CMLI

Claire Thirlwall is director of Oxfordshire based landscape practice Thirlwall Associates. Her book “From Idea to Site: a project guide to creating better landscapes” is published by RIBA Books.

As part of a regular series, chartered landscape architect and author Claire Thirlwall explores tools, projects and guidance available to help our professional understanding of this issue’s topic.

It is easy to identify the direct energy cost of our working practice, such as heating and lighting our workplace or travel to site. But how often do we consider the hidden energy we use?

Data

The power our computer systems consume in our homes and offices is obvious – as we switch on a device, we know it is consuming electricity. However, there is a less obvious use of power caused by how we do our work. As our Dropbox files sync, our Google Photos backup, we carry out a web search or download a file, there is a carbon cost.

Our own computer is a tiny part of our energy use, but with over 4 billion internet users worldwide, the collective impact is significant. Most of the energy used by the information and communications technology (ICT) is out of sight of the user. ICT is estimated to use 10% of the world’s energy demand, equivalent to the combined energy of Germany and Japan, and data centres alone represent 1% of global electricity use. (1)

The data passes through our router, along miles of cables, through powered infrastructure, such as servers and network switches, until it gets to huge data centres often covering hundreds of acres, where it could be saved multiple times. (2) The data centre will be a hot, noisy building that uses vast amounts of power and water for servers and air conditioning. (3)

The amount of data uploaded is vast – every minute, YouTube users upload 500 hours of video content and WhatsApp users relay 41,666,667 messages. (4) One estimate suggests that a year of smartphone use, excluding charging, uses the same amount of energy as a household fridge. (5)

To reduce the impact of your data: – Create links to files or online information rather than sending email attachments – Review your online storage and back up – only store what is needed and remove duplicate files – Consider how much video content you save – five minutes of 4K footage from a 360° camera creates a 2.1GB file, the equivalent of almost 200 high resolution photos – Reduce the file size of any attachments you do send – Outlook has tools to compress pictures or you can compress a file into a zip file before sending. (6) Storing our data offsite has many benefits, such as allowing collaboration or for offsite backup and archive. However, our personal and work behaviour creates a hidden environmental impact that we need to consider.

© iStockphoto

Photographs

The move from analogue to digital photography means that our photo archives now live online. The ease of saving means we can easily accrue tens of thousands of images, many of which we’ll never use again. Online storage is incredibly convenient – we can access our photos anywhere we can connect online, and our own saved Google Photos can be searched in the same way as a web search.

However, that convenient archive has a carbon footprint. Almost 40,000 images in my Google Photos account takes up 102GB of storage. Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, but uploading and synchronising that many files has an energy cost, as the data travels back and forth to the data centres.9 Over four trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week a further 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded. (10)

Only backing up photos that are worth keeping and removing duplicates are two ways to reduce the volume of images stored. The Google Photos app includes a tool to help review storage, highlighting dark or blurry photos you might want to delete. (11)

Water use on site

Once a landscape scheme is complete, it can be easy to think that the energy use is minimal. We might have chosen materials with a small carbon footprint and low energy lighting to reduce the impact of the scheme. However, the long-term maintenance can hide significant energy use.

Where irrigation isn’t provided by rainwater, the use of tap water contributes to carbon emissions. Per litre the impact is small, but like data usage, there is a cumulative impact – the water industry uses up to 3 percent of the total energy used in the UK, with most of that used for water processing. (7) An Anglian Water report showed that in 2018 the company emitted 366,000 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of over 800 million miles driven by an average passenger vehicle. (8)

In line with other sectors the water industry has set a target of net zero by 2030 but even with this commitment we need to consider the impact of irrigating our planting schemes and, where possible, select low water use options.

References

1) L Posani, A Paccoia & M Moschettini, ‘The carbon footprint of distributed cloud storage’, in arXiv:1803.06973 [cs], 2019, <http://arxiv.org/ abs/1803.06973> [accessed 11 May 2021].

2) ‘Look inside Facebook’s Clonee data centre: home to 50k bees, renewable energy and the machines that work your social media’, in Independent, <https:// www.independent.ie/business/technology/ look-inside-facebooks-clonee-data-centre-home-to50k-bees-renewable-energy-and-the-machines-thatwork-your-social-media-37319141.html> [accessed 11 May 2021].

3) ‘The Secret Cost of Google’s Data Centers: Billions of Gallons of Water’, in Time, <https://time. com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/> [accessed 11 May 2021].

4) ‘Domo Resource - Data Never Sleeps 8.0’, <https:// www.domo.com/learn/data-never-sleeps-8> [accessed 11 May 2021].

5) Posani, Paccoia and Moschettini.

6) ‘Reduce the size of pictures and attachments in

7) Great Britain & Environment Agency, Renewable energy potential for the water industry., Bristol, Environment Agency, 2009.

8) ‘Greenhouse Gas Emmisions Annual report 2018’, Anglian Water, 2018, <https://www. anglianwater.co.uk/siteassets/household/in-the -community/ghg-emissions-report-2018.pdf>.