Data Centres and Carbon Footprint

- 65% of internet traffic is accounted for by video (Source)

- 1 hour of video streaming on Netflix produces 55g of carbon dioxide (Source)

- This means for every 1 minute 0.92g of carbon dioxide is produced

- There are over 167 million Netflix subscribers who watch at least 2 hours per day on average (Source). This means per day, approximately 18,370,000,000 grams of carbon dioxide is produced (55x2x167000000)

-This means per year (18,370,000,000x365) 6,705,050,000,000 grams of carbon dioxide is produced

Data centres are a dedicated space to house computer systems. For streaming CDCs (Cloud Data Centres) are used. Centres require lots of power for running the systems and cooling them. Backup power is stored in the form of battery banks or gas/diesel turbines. They are cooled by both heat pumps and liquid cooling. To reduce power cost and to help with this cooling, the centres are often located near large bodies of water and sometimes use hydropower to get supplied with energy. In 2020 data centres used 1% of world electricity and in 2018 data centres were responsible for 0.5% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Data centres are connected by underwater large fibre optic cables. (Source)

Put simply, streaming is the flow of data. Media servers hold encoded video files which are compressed to reduce bandwidth (the range of frequencies a signal can be transmitted. Videos are stored on the cloud, a storage space on the internet owned by a third-party company such as Netflix. The video and audio data is broken into data packets which the player on the user's device interprets as audio and video once the packets are received. (Source)

Here is an example of one of Google's data centres. It is extremely secure to stop unauthorised access and has a range of experts working there.

As of 2021 there were nearly 8,000 data centres globally (Source) and each on average occupies 100,000 square feet of land. (Source)