Spotlight on… Cloud Computing

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector is responsible for at least 1.7% of global carbon emissions, with four ICT companies ranking among the top 20 corporate electricity consumers worldwide according to the World Bank. As digitalization accelerates, the demand for energy continues to rise.

Yet, one-third of the world’s population remains unconnected to the internet and expanding connectivity will only further increase the sector’s energy consumption and environmental footprint.

Responding to the climate challenge, the ICT industry has committed to reducing its total emissions by nearly half by 2030. Private sector companies, the primary drivers of growth and innovation in the industry, are leading efforts to address emissions and energy use. The sector is also emerging as a global leader in renewable energy adoption, with six of the top 10 corporate purchasers of renewable energy in 2022 coming from the tech industry.

These challenges require specialists and engineers who are aware of the implications for sustainability in their work, and who are capable to provide ICT solutions that minimize environmental impact. Sustainability is an important component in the skill competition of Cloud Computing, and has an important weight in the WorldSkills Occupational Standards as well as in the evaluation of the Test Project at the Competition.

WorldSkills Chief Expert in Cloud Computing, Dr Fernando Pérez Téllez, explains: “Competitors are given a real-world problem to solve with the cloud computing services. One of the metrics is performance efficiency, which is very relevant to sustainability, together with the cost of the solution. The cost is also very relevant because it is correlated with the amount of energy and resources being used.”

With data centres being responsible for a large percentage of the ICT’s sector carbon footprint, it is a matter of “big concern to have sustainable strategies at different levels, from the private sector, to the government, to down to the education level,” says Fernando, who is also a Lecturer at the Faculty of Computing, Digital and Data at Technological University Dublin or TU Dublin. The institution is the first in Ireland to offer a master’s degree in Sustainable Cloud Computing, responding to the need to educate future professionals in new ways of designing architectures that are more efficient.

“For instance, AI systems are very relevant nowadays, but they are also consuming a lot of energy. So, we want to make students aware of this and help them identify the scenarios where a smaller approach could be used to solve the same problem, with less energy,” says Fernando.

Ireland is, in fact, one of the densest data centre hubs in the world, with over 80 data centres, mostly in the Dublin area. It is estimated that in 2022 these centres consumed almost one-fifth of the country’s electricity. This has prompted the government to search for a balance between the “twin transitions” of digitalization and decarbonization, and added criteria that prioritizes the development of sustainable data centres.

“Data centres use water as a cooling system, and so operators are coming up with ways to give water a second use and to recycle the waste heat,” he says. “Our University Campus here in the district of Tallaght in Dublin is a great example of it. We are benefitting from low carbon heat being provided to the district by reusing excess heat from a nearby Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) data centre.”

As the demand for digital services continues to grow, so does the responsibility of the ICT sector to innovate sustainably. Cloud Computing specialists are at the forefront of this shift, designing smarter, greener solutions that balance performance with environmental responsibility.