Server farms are energy-intensive businesses with a significant environmental impact.

We are used to taking photos, creating and sharing videos, using cryptocurrencies, sending messages, interacting with people via social networks, using electronic accounting stored in the cloud.

All comfortable, all simple, all smart, too bad we don't realize the environmental impact that these companies can cause by using continuously large amounts of electricity and water to cool the servers.

To prevent people from thinking that what is not seen, or can be heard in terms of smells or noises, cannot be a problem, we can begin by saying that every Gigabyte that we exchange or produce has an energy cost.

If we multiply our Gigabytes by the number of operations we do daily with our mobile phone or computer and, these, by the number of people who simultaneously carry out the same operations during the day, we are faced with a mass of data that is exchanged and archived of colossal proportions.

The multinationals that take care of guaranteeing our virtual archives, cloud in fact, have made a thriving business out of this necessity, having built physical companies in which servers are installed that create the space we need, renting it to us forever.

To keep these data centers running efficiently and continuously, 24/7 , a huge amount of electricity and water is used for cooling the systems, which have a negative impact on the environment.

Let's take an example, a data center can consume more electricity than an average town, regardless of data traffic in the area, as the systems are used to the maximum, to satisfy our virtual needs at every single moment of the day and night or to deal with even hypothetical ones, i.e. manage any data peaks.

How to solve the problem?

Progress is not to be stopped with reactionary solutions, but rather it is to be increased and improved, but through a more sustainable approach to our daily needs.

We can take the example of Aruba, which has built two new sustainable data centers, studying the possibility of minimizing the energy impact and the creation of CO2.

The new data centers, which will store the data of millions of citizens and businesses, are powered entirely by renewable sources, through the photovoltaic panels positioned in the structure, plus internal geothermal systems and a proprietary hydroelectric plant.

The union of these three renewable sources of energy allows a more sustainable approach to work, moreover it has installed geothermal systems, which benefit from the presence of groundwater, allowing the cooling of the machines in an ecological way.

Machine translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.