Southwest Environmental Limited

Carbon Offset for Data Centres

If you would like to offset the carbon for you data centre please get in touch.

Data centres use a lot of energy whether for cooling or actual server energy input requirements. This page works through examples of what that means in terms of data centre carbon footprints and costs for offsetting.

World Data Centre Energy Use

Nature Magazine: Already, data centres use an estimated 200 terawatt hours (TWh) each year. That is more than the national energy consumption of some countries, including Iran, but half of the electricity used for transport worldwide, and just 1% of global electricity demand .

This energy use figure is very large, and indigestible. For this example we will look to a single example data centre.

Average Data Centre Energy Use

Data from the below table puts an average European Data centre as using 13,684MWh per year of energy. We can assume that this is electrical energy and make a conversion to work out the carbon footprint from energy.

There would be other carbon emissions to add in, in order to paint a complete picture, but we can expect the bulk of emissions to be due to electricity use, unless on site renewables are employed.

Average Data Centre Carbon Footprint

So we can easily convert electrical energy in to a carbon footprint, the figure is 3800 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per annum. This is the same as flying London to Hong Kong and back about 300 times. So to recap we need to offset 3800 t/co2e.

Average Data Centre Carbon Offset Cost

At the time of writing well managed UK carbon offset from tree planting costs £20 a ton upwards. If we assume the lower figure of £20 a ton. Then to offset a data centre for one year will cost £80,000. No small sum.

Out of interest this would require around 381 hectares of woodland offset to be purchased ever year.