Mobiles use more energy than you think

When your mobile devices aren’t plugged in, it’s very easy to forget that they’re still consuming a lot of energy - not from charging, but from your internet usage. You may or may not believe this but a recent study conducted by the Eureca project estimated that the energy required just to stream/download the song Despacito 5 billion times was genuinely as much as was consumed by 5 African countries for an entire year(!)

The reason intangible things like wifi and data take up so much energy is the data centres which they flow through – large buildings, full of servers which require a lot of cooling down. In the UK (as of 2014) we have the third highest use of space for data centres globally, shockingly we were higher than China and India, but only used a third of the space compared to the US. The worst part is that Eureca’s study found that within the EU, data centres consumed 25% more energy in 2017 than they did in 2014.

Major companies like Apple and Facebook are working on making their huge data centres entirely renewable, but obviously there are thousands of smaller data centres out there who need to keep on top of their impact on the environment, otherwise their cumulative effect could be awful over the next few decades, as populations swell and smartphone ownership rises.

A local good news story

The good news is that many companies are actually already doing something about it. Blue Chip opened a state of the art data centre in Bedford in 2010, and calculated that 2000 mature trees would lock up the carbon resulting from the operation of each server rack (of which they have 348). They’re working with us in the long term to plant those 768,000 trees, which will make a huge difference to the local area AND capture their carbon. Hopefully, over the next few years everyone will take after Blue Chip and start taking responsibility for the environment, both locally and globally (or alternatively, maybe people will just stop streaming Despacito…) 

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You can learn more about Blue Chip and our other Corporate Friends here. If you’re interested in making your business greener, then contact us on 01234 762605 or send us an email, and we can look at how we can work together to create a greener heart of Bedfordshire.