Europe’s datacentres will gobble up a lot more electricity

Cables and servers in the computers room at a datacentre, a subsidiary of the French Free wireless service provider group, in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumone. Despite the tech industry’s focus on renewable energy, datacentres still need large amounts of fossil fuels to keep them running, and the European Union has urged sites to be made more climate friendly. — AFP

Europe’s datacentre industry will use much more electricity by the end of this decade, accounting for about a quarter of total power consumption in Ireland alone, according to BloombergNEF.

The region’s transition to a digital economy will need more megacentres to store and process vast amounts of data, requiring extra electricity to run and keep computers from overheating. That means power demand at the sites in the key markets of Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Norway and Ireland should jump about 80% to almost 48 terrawatt-hours by 2030, BloombergNEF said.