Roundtable: Data Centres and Climate Change – how can we develop and encourage best practice?

The All Party Parliamentary Groups on Climate Change and Data Analytics are looking to build on the findings and recommendations of our report ‘Is Staying Online Costing the Earth?’, which examined the impact of ICT on emissions. This roundtable will develop some of the recommendations by examining how we can develop and encourage best practice in the public and private sector.

With ever more devices moving to the cloud, there are increasing concerns about the energy demands of data centres. The roundtable will seek to tackle some of the key myths and misconceptions around data centres and climate change, and build on the recommendations of the report ‘Is Staying Online Costing the Earth?’. A group of academics, industry representatives, local and central government and charities will join politicians to address the questions below and present a view on how we can ensure sustainable growth of a key element of the digital economy.

In particular, the following recommendations will be examined:

1. Government should commit to collating available data on energy consumption of ICT, identifying gaps and measuring the energy use that is still unknown.
2. Government should support the development and wide-scale adoption of emerging technologies that can optimise systems and facilitate energy efficiencies and provide UK with export opportunities.
3. The public sector should lead by example in implementing energy management best practice, e.g. consolidating data centres into more efficiently run facilities, and purchasing renewable energy.

Key Questions:

1. Data centres will play an increasingly important role in the economy. What are the risks/opportunities of this with regards to climate change?
2. What organisations (private and public) are leading the way when it comes to efficiency?
3. What barriers stop organisations (public and private) from improving their energy efficiency and using cloud computing?
4. How can policymakers encourage best practice in the private and public sector?

Chairs

The roundtable will be co-chaired by Antoinette Sandbach MP and Daniel Zeichner MP.

Speakers:

• Rabih Bashroush, University of East London
• Adam Turner, DEFRA
• Pip Squires, Ark Data Centres
• Emma Fryer, Tech UK

If you would like to attend – please email Jack Tindale.