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Data Center Emissions Much Higher Than Reported

September 16, 20242 months ago Steve Hanley 0 Comments

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One thing that frosts my shorts is a press release from some renewable energy developer touting how many homes a new installation can power. The dirty little secret no one wants to talk about is that much of the new renewable energy coming online today will be used to power a data center or two that provide AI or cryptocurrency services, and the problem is getting worse with every passing day. Now when we conduct a Google search, we don’t get a list of results, we get an AI generated overview that uses much more energy.

This is madness. As the world sails toward a cataclysmic climate cliff, we are blunting the benefits of renewable energy so we can enjoy artificial intelligence we don’t need and can’t use. This is like making our cars and trucks heavier and heavier in the name of crash protection. Where does it end? If we all drove a 10,000-pound vehicle, would we be any safer or just using more resources? Certainly pedestrians and bicyclists don’t derive any benefit from all that extra bulk.

Data Center Emissions

The Guardian has compiled emissions data from company-owned data centers at Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple for the years 2020 through 2022, and found they are 7.62 times higher than officially reported. Amazon is the largest emitter of the big five tech companies by a wide margin, but its emissions were excluded from the calculations because its business model makes it difficult to isolate data center specific emissions figures for the company.

The International Energy Agency said data centers accounted for 1% to 1.5% of total global electricity consumption in 2022, but that was before the launch of ChatGPT at the end of that year. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query uses 10 times more electricity than a standard Google search. It projects data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. Morgan Stanley projects that data center emissions will add 2.5 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030. All five of the major tech companies have claimed to be carbon neutral. Amazon claimed in July it had met its goal seven years early.

“It’s down to creative accounting,” explained a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an advocacy group composed of current Amazon employees who are dissatisfied with their employer’s action on climate. “Amazon, despite all the PR and propaganda that you’re seeing about their solar farms, about their electric vans, is expanding its fossil fuel use, whether it’s in data centers or whether it’s in diesel trucks.” Such creative accounting is made possible by the use of renewable energy certificates that a company purchases to show it is buying renewable-generated electricity to match a portion of its electricity consumption. But there is a catch. The renewable energy in question doesn’t need to be consumed by a company’s facilities. Rather, the site of production can be anywhere from one town over to an ocean away.

The Chimera Of Renewable Energy Credits

RECs are used to calculate “market-based” emissions, or the official emissions figures used by the firms. When RECs and offsets are left out of the equation, we get location-based emissions — the actual emissions generated from the area where the data is being processed. Many data center industry experts recognize that location-based metrics are more honest than the official market-based numbers reported. “Location based [accounting] gives an accurate picture of the emissions associated with the energy that’s actually being consumed to run the data center. And Uptime’s view is that it’s the right metric,” said Jay Dietrich, the research director of sustainability at Uptime Institute, a leading data center advisory and research organization.

Academics and carbon management industry leaders oppose the use of RECs. In 2015, more than 50 of them argued that “it should be a bedrock principle of GHG accounting that no company be allowed to report a reduction in its GHG footprint for an action that results in no change in overall GHG emissions. Yet this is precisely what can happen under the guidance given the contractual/REC based reporting method.” Location-based numbers are only directly reported — that is, not hidden in third-party assurance statements or in footnotes — by two companies, Google and Meta. But even those two companies only include those figures for one sub-type of emissions — Scope 2, or the indirect emissions companies cause by purchasing energy from utilities and large-scale generators.

The massive differences in location-based and official Scope 2 emissions showcase just how carbon-intensive data centers really are, and how deceptive firms’ official emissions numbers can be. Meta, for example, reports its official Scope 2 emissions for 2022 as 273 metric tons CO2 equivalent — all of that attributable to data centers. Under the location-based accounting system, that number jumps to more than 3.8 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent for data centers alone — an increase of more than 19,000 times that. A similar result can be seen with Microsoft. The firm reported its official data center related emissions for 2022 as 280,782 metric tons CO2 equivalent. Under a location-based accounting method, that number jumps to 6.1 million metric tons CO2 equivalent — nearly 22 times more.

Scope 3 Emissions

When it comes to data centers, Scope 3 emissions include the carbon emitted from the construction of in-house data centers, as well as the carbon emitted during the manufacturing process of the equipment used inside those in-house data centers. It may also include those emissions as well as the electricity-related emissions of third-party data centers that they are partnered with.

However, whether or not these emissions are fully included in reports is almost impossible to prove. “Scope 3 emissions are hugely uncertain,” said Uptime’s Dietrich. “This area is a mess just in terms of accounting.” He said some third party data center operators put their energy-related emissions in their own Scope 2 reporting, so those who rent from them can put those emissions into their Scope 3.

Other third party data center operators put energy related emissions into their Scope 3 emissions, expecting their tenants to report those emissions in their own Scope 2 reporting. Additionally, all firms use market-based metrics for these Scope 3 numbers, which means third-party data center emissions are also under-counted in official figures.

Even though big tech hides these emissions, they are due to keep rising. Data centers’ electricity demand is projected to double by 2030 due to the additional load that artificial intelligence poses, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Google and Microsoft both blamed AI for their recent upticks in market-based emissions.

Whether today’s power grids can withstand the growing energy demands of AI is uncertain. One industry leader, Marc Ganzi, the CEO of DigitalBridge, has said the data center sector may run out of power within the next two years. As grid interconnection backlogs continue to pile up worldwide, it may be nearly impossible for even the most well meaning companies to get new renewable energy production capacity online in time to meet that demand.

The Takeaway

The answer, as it almost always does, comes down to this — figures lie and liars figure. The upshot of all this is that data centers have a voracious appetite for electricity. When it comes to determining what the carbon emissions are from those operations, it is nearly impossible to get a straight answer.

We at CleanTechnica are passionate advocates for clean energy, yet it seems society’s fixation on artificial intelligence may require us to divert almost all new renewable energy to serving the needs of Big Data, rather than the needs of consumers and industry. If that sounds like squandering an important opportunity, you would not be wrong.