Today, we celebrate Earth Day 2025, an event created to champion and support environmental protection. The world we live in today is practically unrecognizable from the first ever Earth Day, held in 1970. Industrialization and technological advancements have reshaped society, and emerging technologies like AI and hyperscale data centers pose new challenges such as increasing energy consumption and carbon footprints. As the digital economy grows, so do environmental pressures, making sustainability efforts more urgent. Earth Day’s original mission to protect our planet is more critical than ever, urging us to balance innovation with environmental responsibility to ensure a sustainable future for all.

How to Power the Planet?

The theme for this year’s Earth Day is Our Power, Our Planet, with the Earth Day organisation calling for global renewable energy generation to be tripled by 2030. The theme makes sense, especially in the context of 2025 with data centres and technologies such as AI putting an incredible strain on power grids, and the environment.

As we all know, fossil fuels are major emitters of greenhouse gasses and thus are primary contributors to global warming. According to the U.S Energy Information Administration in 2023, petroleum accounted for roughly 38% of U.S. energy consumption and was responsible for 47% of U.S energy-related CO2 emissions. Utilising renewable energy sources is crucial for reducing greenhouse gas emissions because renewables generate electricity without producing carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas.

However, renewable energy is only part of the solution. The exponential increase in data centre energy consumption requires not only alternate power sources such as renewables, but fundamental change at the technology level to mitigate the energy needs of data centres in the modern age.

The Dilemma in Data Centres

Data centres operate around the clock, housing three core technologies: servers to process data, storage systems to hold the data, and high-speed networks to move data. To keep these systems cool and functional, additional energy-intensive cooling and fire prevention systems are also necessary, sometimes consuming up to half of the energy used by the IT equipment itself.

It’s not only power that needs to be considered when it comes to cooling, it’s water too. Many data centres use evaporative cooling, where a fine mist of water is sprayed onto fabric panels, the ambient heat is absorbed by the water and thus cools the air in the area. It’s a smart idea, but it’s problematic given the additional strain climate change is putting on water resources, especially in urban areas.

E-waste is another rapidly growing environmental issue, with data centres contributing significantly due to hardware refresh cycles every 3-5 years. This constant replacement results in massive amounts of obsolete equipment being discarded, much of which contains harmful substances like lead and mercury. Globally, only about 12.5% of e-waste is recycled, with the rest often ending up in landfills, which is a huge issue.

What can be done today?

To improve energy efficiency across networking and servers in data centres, there needs to be a broad focus on optimising the relationship between hardware and software, virtualisation, smart power management, cooling, and the use of renewable energy sources. In terms of data storage, industry estimates suggest that upwards of 80% of data storage sold annually consists of magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs). These HDDs are relics of the past, greedily absorb vast swathes of energy which could be better spent elsewhere. Flash storage, the same technology used in smartphones and laptops, stands out as an effective solution. Going one step further than the flash found in smartphones, some vendors are leveraging “raw” flash to build their flash arrays, rather than relying on buying commodity SSDs, which talk to their flash drives in essentially the same way they would a legacy hard drive. This maximises the capabilities of flash and provides better performance, power utilisation, and efficiency. With this kind of flash, organisations can reduce their storage-related energy, space, and administrative requirements by up to 95% compared to HDD solutions.

Sustainability Critical to Digital Future

As we approach Earth Day, it’s clear that the sustainability challenges facing our planet are growing more pressing. While renewable energy is a critical part of the solution, adopting the most energy efficient technologies also plays a significant role. By transitioning to more sustainable solutions, we can significantly reduce energy consumption and help preserve the environment. The mission of Earth Day—to protect and sustain the planet—remains as important as ever. It’s time to act, sustainability and progress can go hand in hand, as long as the right technology choices are made today.

By Fred Lherault, Field CTO, EMEA / Emerging Markets, Pure Storage

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