Most large corporate, and all responsible businesses, make every effort to ensure their operations are sustainable and energy efficient, both from an environmental perspective and to minimise the effects of ever rising energy costs. These businesses naturally expect their suppliers to follow suit because, at the very least, bought in services form part of their overall carbon footprint.
In many sectors sustainable practices are critical. For example we work with a lot of businesses in the construction industry where decisions from the selection of environmentally friendly and recyclable materials to energy efficient systems for lighting and heating, sustainable practices and techniques have long been adopted by leading
property development and construction companies.
Whilst technology hasn’t necessarily been considered a significant factor in this, there is a growing awareness of the impact that data centres in particular have on energy use. In the Republic of Ireland for example, which is home to several big tech firms such as Google and Meta, data centres accounted for nearly a fifth of all electricity used in
2022 and this is expected to rise to around one-third of the country’s electricity by 2026. The amount of electricity being used by data centres in the country has risen by 400% since 2015 and Google’s applicatoin to construct a new data centre just outside Dublin has just been rejected by the Council.
"The council said it had rejected the proposal for a 72,400m2 data storage facility because it did not address how much power the site would consume once operational in 2027. The council’s decision aligns with Ireland’s growing concerns over electricity grid constraints, partly due to the increasing number of power-hungry data centres that are essential for cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI) applications."
Techmonitor article 28.08.24
Whilst the demand for cloud services, and increasingly for AI, has driven the need for more and more data centres, these are also where websites and web applications are hosted on servers that house the databases and CPUs that need electricity to run. Green web solutions, which are principally focused on ‘clean’ and optimised code, can reduce data usage and processing power significantly - optimised websites can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 75%. Those content management systems that use templates, third party plugins and themes are often very inefficient from a code perspective because the options that aren't used, such as other features, whilst they might not be published the unused redundant code remains - it might not be used, but it’s still there.
'Clean' code, which is written specifically to perform a task or function, is much more efficient because there is no redundant code for the processors to work through. Clean code also increases website speed and load times, leading to a better user experience, improved SEO and typically lower costs. The Umbraco CMS that we implement uses super light and efficient code, and because we don't use tempaltes, themes or plugins the code we write is bespoke and optimised to provide quicker load times that need less processing power.
Our hosting partner Microsoft Azure is also focused on sustainability. Azure has been 100% carbon neutral since 2012 and they are on target to use 100% renewable energy sources by 2025. They aim to be water positive by 2030 and achieve zero-waste certification by 2030.
Your website might not be top of the list when it comes calculating your carbon footprint or thinking about energy efficiency, but a well written site that uses clean code does have a significant impact by reducing processing power and CO2 emissions by up to 75%.