The theme for this year’s Earth Day is simple, yet profound: Restore our Earth. The focus is on natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking to restore the world’s ecosystems.
51 years ago, April 22 was established as Earth Day by the American senator, governor and environmentalist Gaylord Nelson. Initially, it was to encourage fellow Americans to protect the environment.
It has since become a global day of action to restore our Earth and to promote environmental sustainability.
This year, many summits and events are planned across the globe, with the spotlight on President Joe Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate, which will be live streamed for public viewing. The key objectives range from galvanising efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degree celsius, to spurring transformative green technologies that could reduce emissions. The complete description of the summit can be found here.
The technological race to curb climate change.
Technological innovation has been a recurring theme for many Earth Days. In his latest book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (a recommended read for those keen to learn more about the current status in combating climate issues), Bill Gates emphasises the importance in innovating technological solutions to curb rising global carbon emissions.
Scientists, engineers, corporations and governments around the world are working hand-in-hand to develop technologies that could shrink our carbon footprint. From improved methods to store renewable energy to sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere (yup, you heard that right), environmental tech is currently outpacing policy in the race to decarbonise our energy system.
The power of data.
Another omnipresent yet invisible source of carbon is data. It’s everywhere! Data centres that bring the internet to us all run day and night, requiring massive amounts of energy to operate. Much of the energy is used by the cooling technologies to keep the electronics from overheating. As you might guess, the carbon footprint is enormous without the implementation of Green IT strategies.
The practice of Green IT revolves around policies and procedures that reduce energy consumption and environmental impacts of computing resources. A great free-access article here outlines the significant role IT services could play in resolving the carbon emission merry-go-round. Without efficiency measures, the IT sector could account for 20% of electricity demand by 2025, amounting to 5.5% of the globe’s carbon emissions!
DUG’s commitment to a cleaner world.
While being at the forefront of high-performance computing (HPC), the team at DUG also pride ourselves on being highly committed to reducing our carbon footprint by investing in cutting-edge green HPC technology.
Boasting some of the greenest computer centres in the world and having industry awards under our belt, our patented DUG Cool immersion cooling system was developed to reduce the energy footprint of our data centres.
Up to 46% power savings. PUE of less than 1.05 which is one of the lowest of any data centre in the world. Environmentally-friendly dielectric cooling fluid. Long-lasting equipment. Lower maintenance. Dramatically reduced down-time. These are just some of the features of DUG’s innovative data centres that prolong the working life of our supercomputers and lower the impact on the environment.
Watch DUG’s Managing Director, Dr Matthew Lamont, Chief Information Officer, Dr Stuart Midgley and Chief Engineer, Mark Lommers talk about the collaboration between DUG and Skybox Datacenters for the datacentre in Houston:
From governments to corporations, to communities and individuals, we are the world. Before Elon Musk succeeds in terraforming Mars, Earth is the only planet we can call home. Let’s keep it clean.
