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between Deep Green, a small UK start up (with a £200m investment from Octopus Energy) and a Devon leisure centre has saved the facility £100,000 in electricity bills, and with local councils being forced to close swimming pools all over the country because of the cost-of-living crisis, such solutions are inspiring. Deep Green say that if 1% of the UK’s data centre processing demand was harnessed in this way, the company could heat every pool in the country continuously. According to figures from the company, up to 40% of the electricity used by data centres is allocated to cooling the servers. Zoisa North-Bond, chief executive of Octopus Energy Generation said: “To tackle the energy crisis head-on, we need innovative solutions to unusual problems – by using excess heat from data centres to slash energy bills for communities across the UK, Deep Green solves two problems with one solution.” Home-grown solutions will be increasingly important as the instability in Europe and the Middle East, jeopardising our energy supply, is clearly not going away. John Booth welcomes the development of small local data centres where the heat is repurposed elswhere. “It has a lot of benefits, there may be some cost elements to consider, but - and I hesitate to say it - to me it looks like the data centre of the future.”
degrees, which is in-line with the latest in climate science to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, which is passing through Parliament, aims to hold companies accountable when it comes to the green claims they use in their marketing activities to consumers.” Is this something consumers are aware of as well? Dana replied, “Consumers are becoming more aware of the impact of the climate crisis. They’re seeing and being affected by more frequent natural disasters or occurrences of famine across the globe, and here in the UK, we’re seeing repeated flooding events. People are demanding companies, governments, and countries act to protect the planet. Therefore, there’s greater pressure and scrutiny on companies to have robust ESG strategies, with transparent goals aligned to climate science, which are also intrinsically linked to businesses’ objectives and purpose, and which deliver meaningful results.” Data Centres are still being built at a rapid rate, though technology has, as John Booth predicted back in 2021, moved on a pace. Gigantic hyperscalers popping up on the Arctic Circle are being swapped for very small data centres on the edges of towns, and the heat generated from these is being redirected to local swimming pools, for example, something that made headlines this time last year. A partnership
Leadership Good governance is a trickle-down affair; earlier this year Friends of the Earth, Client Earth and the Good Law Project took the UK government to the High Court over their ‘inadequate’ climate action plan. With accusations from all three organisations that the government is for the second time in breach of the Climate Change Act of 2008, it is hardly surprising that this culture has led to a somewhat casual relationship with the truth where corporate sustainability is concerned. Some of the biggest brands on the planet have greenwashed on an epic, shameless scale to the detriment of the environment in the last year alone: Shell, FIFA, HSBC, Lufthansa, Amazon and Ryanair. FIFA crowed about being the first carbon-neutral World Cup in 2023, when it actually produced 4.67m tonnes of C02, making it the most polluting World Cup ever. It seems unlikely there will be any consequences. Broadband was curious; given the poor leadership in place in the UK currently, would the new legislation eradicate spurious sustainability claims in time, or was it a toothless piece of legislation that would be difficult to enforce? Dana Haidan was upbeat. “I welcome any legislation to spur on credible action to prevent global temperatures from rising above 1.5
Photo: Kapish Mak
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Volume 46 No.2 MAY 2024
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