With the integration of artificial intelligence in all facets of digital life, cloud computing is becoming increasingly energy-intensive. Quietly, some agencies and web companies are now promoting “digital sobriety,” a concept that involves attempting to reduce the carbon footprint of online activities. Here are five actions to consider to participate in this movement.
- Choice of hosting provider
Last April, the International Energy Agency issued an alarm signal to announce that the global energy demand of data centers would leap from 460 TWh in 2024 to 1,000 TWh in 2030.
The choice of data center where we will host our site has a huge environmental impact, announces Alexandre Theve, digital product lifecycle analyst at Davidson Canada agency. If I take an Amazon Web Service data center in Iowa for example, I will be on an energy mix that will emit 350 g of CO2 per kilowatt hour, whereas if I decide to position myself in a data center in Quebec, I will have one around 30 g of CO2 per kilowatt hour. That’s 10 times fewer GHG emissions!
Data centers are not all equal. Here again, we can look in a much more granular way at all environmental impacts, by learning about their water consumption, metals, their ionizing radiation emissions, the fact of artificializing soils, etc. The most transparent data centers will know how to answer these questions.
- Website design choice
For Benjamin Rancourt, founder of the responsible digital agency Merisia, a “carbon sober” website concretely has two main characteristics:
it is hosted on a server powered by renewable energy (point 1), then it has been designed with an eco-design perspective and has been optimized to be as light as possible in terms of page weight.
The computer scientist explains some of the eco-design strategies he implements with his clients:
We can rethink the uses of images and especially videos. Optimize/compress different video, audio and image content, to lighten loading, carefully choose the extensions and functionalities used… Then there are more technical strategies, often at the server level, but too often neglected: activate site caching, use compression algorithms (Gzip, minimally, Brotli, ideally) and update the software infrastructure behind the site – the server, the CMS, extensions, etc.
More broadly, he mentions that it is also possible to optimize email deliverability, to avoid unnecessary sends to spam and to reduce the amount of data stored on cloud storage spaces.
- Choice of AI models used
In the next decade, the strong energy demand of data centers will largely come from the use of AI in web applications. It is therefore worth thinking about the personal use of these tools.
I encourage people to use less energy-intensive artificial intelligence services, says Alexandre Theve. Rather than using Open AI, I can make the decision to use smaller models that I will host on my own servers, in my company.
- IT equipment management
A company can reduce its environmental impacts by fighting against planned obsolescence. Alexandre Theve explains that his agency has implemented internal approval mechanisms for IT purchases to ensure that its equipment can participate in the circular economy.
To authorize the purchase of a new computer, we must have at our disposal a detailed and reliable study of the impact of building this computer. We want to have certainty that the equipment is easily repairable. We want to have assurance that the equipment’s lifespan has been thought of in the longest possible way, he explains.
The agency has set itself the goal of extending the lifespan of its computers from 4.5 years to 6 years.
- Make an eco-design declaration on your site
Doing good actions is good. Communicating them with transparency is even better. It sparks curiosity and encourages the movement to take off. Alexandre Theve strongly advises companies to declare their carbon footprint linked to their online activities and mitigation efforts in an eco-design declaration highlighted on the website.
