IT weighs too much on your carbon footprint

Lars Olesen holds a PhD in physics from Aarhus University and has worked extensively with renewable energy and circular economy throughout his career, including in his own company Circ.eco.

Together with Nordic Computer, Lars Olesen has developed an algorithm that can estimate the carbon footprint of buying brand new IT equipment instead of letting existing equipment live longer.

- The challenge is that you can't just calculate on a single device. Nordic Computer needed an algorithm that could deliver results for all the IT equipment that could potentially be in a data centre. So we just had to get to work,’ says Lars Olesen.

The starting point for the work was the assumption that the weight of the IT equipment and the CO2 load are largely related.

- ‘Overall, there is a clear correlation between the weight of IT equipment and the CO2 impact of producing, transporting and disposing of the equipment at the end of its useful life. ‘In simple terms, you could say that the heavier the equipment, the more it impacts the climate,’ says Lars Olesen.

But it's not quite that simple when you delve into the details. There is a big difference between the CO2 impact of the cabinet, fans, the electronic circuit board itself and all the other parts of a server, for example.

That's why it was necessary to calculate the CO2 load from a wide range of different types of components to get a more accurate figure for the total CO2 load.