Latest environment publications

Let’s start by saying that in the near term, copper and fibre will continue to co-exist in the many electrical and communications applications they currently support.

The world’s ever-increasing reliance on energy-hungry data centres underpinning the cloud is the subject of much scrutiny and alarm. But analyst house IDC has checked this concern by quantifying the environmental benefit of workloads continuing to move to hyperscale mega-data centres compared to being kept on-premises in less efficient enterprise data centres.

Japan-based NEC and NTT Communications have developed an air cooling system which they claim slashes air conditioning power consumption in data centres.

The energy-saving system is the first to use a new low-pressure refrigerant called R1224yd, developed by Japanese manufacturer AGC and originally designed for centrifugal chillers, which in addition to being more energy-efficient is more environmentally friendly than other commonly-used refrigerants.

Microsoft has continuously powered a row of data centre servers for 48 hours using hydrogen fuel cells, the tech giant announced Monday.

Microsoft powered a row of data centre servers for 48 hours using a 250-kilowatt fuel system built by Utah-based developer Power Innovations, based on a concept system tested at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2018.

The system uses proton exchange membrane or PEM hydrogen fuel cells which combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce water vapour and electricity.

Microsoft has detailed how it plans to meet its ambitious goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.

The pledge, made by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, President Brad Smith, and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood in January, is the most sweeping carbon commitment made by any company.

At the time, Microsoft said it was working on an initiative to reducing its carbon, water, waste footprints and promote biodiversity, but offered few details on what this initiative would entail.