DATA CENTRES INSTEAD OF HOUSING, CLOUD MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEOPLE.

Earlier this year, the Greater London Authority (GLA) wrote a letter to housing developers warning them that they’re unlikely to get approval for any new build projects until the mid-2030s in three key west London boroughs because there is a lack of “sufficient electrical capacity for a new connection”.  The reason? Data centres. The average data centre uses 50 megawatts of power, equivalent to more than 5,000 homes – the total number of new builds constructed in those three boroughs, Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow, in 2019/20 – the latest year for which data is available. Larger data centres in the US have been reported to use the equivalent of 80,000 homes. Around 70% of that energy demand, according to Richard Clifford, head of solutions at Keysource, a data centre consultancy, goes to the IT equipment inside data centres: racks upon racks of servers and hard drives. The remaining 30% powers the equipment that cools the IT, such as enormous fans in order to ensure they run at prime performance. Just a few weeks ago, the GLA told developers that the majority of homes could now go ahead –  Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks says it has fixed the capacity issue. Out of 66 developers affected by the electricity shortage, 42 can connect to the grid. But the mayor said there were still issues with hospitals and electric vehicle charging points in west London. And constraints to the electricity network point to a growing problem with the powering and cooling of data centres – and our growing hunger for data. Another pressing issue is drinking water. Data centres often use huge volumes of water to cool the equipment, running it through pipework that passes over the IT hardware as a heat sink. A 15 megawatt data centre can use up to 360,000 gallons of water a day – enough to supply 2,500 homes. Data centres in the UK are competing with consumers for drinking water – a fact that became a pressing issue this summer during the driest July in 90 years. Thames Water revealed it was looking for ways to measure how much water data centres are using, after it was forced to ban watering lawns and gardens last summer. But if a data centre uses less water, it requires more energy to cool itself. So if you are homeless and living in a tent and want to use your social media try to find a free wifi source as that seems to be the reason for the housing shortage !!!.