More than half of the worlds population uses the internet whether on the move at home or at work were constantly connected often for hours on end. And feel how life is online. And youre only as smart as your wife i connection huge amounts of data travel across the internet and that uses a lot of energy the future isnt digital and that future needs storage space. I mean the data is doubled every year and this they can use to sit some are the digital age is powered by millions of servers stored in giant in largely unseen data centers its all we need to map out how were going to make the digital revolution sustainable and contain its environmental impact. And. This facility belongs to the german based Software Giant s. A. P goods is the corporations head of Data Center Services this is the home of the cloud thousands of super Fast Computers that Exchange Data while we use our internet connected devices to work shop watch t. V. Or play digital games. From the cloud is the other end of the internet the machines behind our Computers Tablets and smartphones but gigantic invisible and energy consuming that work. The physical manifestation of the a theory all internet. Yet. Yes a. P. Has more than twenty thousand servers in this facility that need the electricity to calculate and run the applications. Those energy needs are enormous data centers in germany alone use the equivalent of five large power plants about forty such facilities operate worldwide just to power the internet. If the worldwide web were a country it would rank sixth in the world for the amount of energy it uses and carbon it emits. Here comes a board saying here you can see how much energy a data center of this size consume is right now in one of our two energy power supply facilities the optional it is nearly thirty megawatts. Thats enough to power a small town or several small communities here in germany. A lot of the energy is used to cool the computers which heat up when theyre in use. Curtis think thats why the cooling technology requires electricity and water and electricity powers the fans and the pumps and the water cools the Heat Exchangers to here organising. On and this idea about the ship this is called adiabatic cooling the water evaporates and that lowers the temperature and. Its a very efficient and economical process but if its really hot outside we have to switch over to a large refrigeration system to keep the facility cool trying to. Avoid. The heat thats generated by the servers is a serious problem. I t experts and engineers around the world are trying to come up with solutions. Lots of people use the internet all day long frequently checking into social media platforms like Facebook Twitter or youtube and all those billions of clicks use a lot of energy these four young women in berlin are roommates ana martina and not use Digital Technology to organize their home. And thats why they call themselves smart roommates. Say as opposed to mom the same thing weve seen when we get up in the morning hes checking out emails and facebook and Instagram Instagram noise to make it insanely guns comes. With life and then you can communicate with people all over the world but is that like the idea of having friends in other countries than this so i stay in touch with and contact times that. I do my work in a Cloud Platform with a colleague we Exchange Data and work on documents together and its a new comes off as much i need to chill maps a loss there really helpful in a big city like been and so with things like. Bike sharing car sharing bike sharing. These women are among the three billion people around the world who regularly use the internet but few people realize that when they click on a website theyre locking into a Global Infrastructure that gobbles up massive amounts of energy. Data centers are often housed in in conspicuous Industrial Buildings like this one in frankfurt the Interaction Company operates twelve data centers here and its building more. This is also the home of the Worlds LargestInternet Exchange point called kicks. These rooms full of batteries are used to maintain an uninterrupted supply of power. And operate a high tech Fire Suppression system. That uses argon gas to reduce oxygen content in the affected area so any fire would burn out on its own. Interactions data centers have their own transformer substation. It converts high Voltage Electric power that comes in from the grid into low voltage power that can be distributed throughout the facility. The substations are outfitted with backup systems to ensure consistency supply of electricity during emergencies like Power Outages or surges. The data centers in frankfurt consume twenty percent of all the electricity used in the city thats more than frankfurt Huge International airport. We were outside berlin near the small town of gone say. Ten months on top of us Author University professor and expert on sustainable digitise zation lives here with his family a few friends and some animals. On top of us studies the impact that Digital Technology has on the environment the economy and society in general. Some tough ios as a hobby farmer its definitely a low tech existence. But try as he might he cant completely avoid using Digital Technology. And he should also visit them on a smartphones also im trying to stay off my smartphone but the sheep are online on their own fitted with radio frequency identification your tax money those tags use an electromagnetic field to keep track of the animals. On them of course the internet offers us a number of wonderful new opportunities. And they can make our lives easier and more enjoyable its fantastic. Alaskans out on but we pay a price for that because this technology consumes a huge amount of energy and our supply of electricity on this planet is limited and. The Data Technology sector is booming new data centers like this one it s a p Corporate Headquarters involved off in southwestern germany are being built all over the world. But no one in new technology has created a wide variety of applications like the internet of things and block chain and we believe that this will require a substantial increase in datacenter capacity. Ok i thought thats why i say p is building new data centers word Cloud Systems and were expanding some of the old ones like this one here. We did manage to double its capacity. I think its safe to assume that the time it takes to process data will increase sharply worldwide. I think so i like something that tell me a joke. But how does why is the trouble in the world quietus car. Theres so little space inside that your knees cover your ears. A digital device that can tell jokes may seem unnecessary to some but more and more people are using these gadgets and not just at home. Experts predict that fifty billion of these devices will be in use by two thousand and twenty in combination with the internet of things Online Gaming video streaming sites and four k. T. V. We have to drive to the video store to render a buyer film. But today you can stream it while that uses up to one third less energy per film there has the same time been a dramatic rise in streaming video through the internet. Video already accounts for seventy percent of internet traffic on the net stuff. Today many Household Appliances have their own internet address and they can be controlled and monitored by smart home technology. Natalia one of the smart roommates describes how the system works. That is that this is the central server for our apartment we use it to monitor devices in all the rooms. And i have different personal settings for mornings and evenings. In the morning for example i have a special playlist that wakes me. And its great that i can monitor the Room Temperature and even the Carbon Dioxide levels he said that we have the same interface on our mobile phone so we can change the settings even when were not homeless hostels. Worldwide Data Transfer traffic doubles every eighteen months and the next big boom is already underway. Here at the annual high Tech Industrial trade fair in hanover a lot of people are excited about industry four point zero which is shorthand for automation and Data Exchange in manufacturing technology. Falcon to man is a Senior Researcher at the berlin based porter step institute. This woman the internets consumption of electricity is growing by leaps and bounds. Thats true in part to the huge amount of Data Transfer. Here at the trade fair you can see that all of the machines are outfitted with sensors that collect data continuously. Right now in germany our Energy Requirements for the internet and data centers at just under thirteen terawatt alice thats about as much energy as the city of berlin uses in an entire year. Or the amount of off shore energy thats produced in the boat called no seeing. These numbers will increase perhaps by as much as twenty five percent over the next five or six years. Yes woman but not of all. Visitors to the trade fair contest augmented or Virtual Reality technology and find out more about the latest developments in robotics. This technology will soon be available just about everywhere and it too will require a lot of energy. Towards increasingly Larger Data Centers we call the hyperscale facility. There is because several football fields consume as much electricity is a town or small city. The corporations like google and facebook microsoft and apple are building their own data centers. Microsoft there are about three hundred fifty of such facilities right now around the world. And we expect that number to double over the next five years for the open yet. Many believe that Digital Technology will help reduce the consumption of fossil fuels like petroleum and natural gas particularly when it comes to cars. New data streams designed to enhance Automotive Technology are already being developed. To run the hardest one smart are all today we have smart cars that use a lot of this technology they generate about twenty five gigabytes of data per hour. And there will be a huge increase in Data Transfer as we develop Driverless Cars it could be as much as two hundred fifty gigabytes per hour. If you printed out that amount of data youd have one hundred tons of paper and youd need four big trucks to move it around just for the amount of data generated in one alan i know store not thought not for the. Idea that its. Very relevant to Driverless Cars may help to reduce the number of vehicles on the road particularly if people use car sharing programs or a robot tax subsidy or. Cashiering would have so fewer people will actually have to own a car at any cost and. They dont see it that you know a lot of them that would be a positive development because the industry of automobile production uses a lot of resources. So savings there would be a good thing. On the other hand Driverless Cars will require an enormous Data Infrastructure because those vehicles are constantly scanning their surroundings. Data streams from the lasers sensors Radar Technology and other. Devices in addition these vehicles will require a constant flow of three d. Map data going up so blocking the dream as for example a robot taxi could generate up to four terabytes of data over twenty four hours that im tired is too few it tells and. Means that over a period of thirty six hours it would be producing as much data as the entire number of people on line around the world today fulfill the altered exempt of ethical. This is the north fjord on norways southwest coast the fjord is more than one hundred kilometers long. The natural landscape here is breathtaking. This area is also home to the left all mine data center. The facility was built on the site of a former mine and it could serve as a model for more efficient and sustainable storage of huge computer systems. A shipment of High Performance computers has just arrived at the data center. There in this big container. The computers are prewired and ready to be hooked up to the internet. The computers are transported deep into the data center complex. Where we have three containers arriving almost every week and then in two years from now this level three will be completed with forty five megawatts here three facility over the next period up to ten the earth will fill the entire data center and this small. Mots on the sun has the marketing director of what set to become one of europes biggest data centers. The facility has a total potential Storage Capacity of more than one hundred twenty thousand square meters the equivalent of sixteen soccer fields. Spread out over six up geranium levels. This site is protected by a state of the art security system. And paved road ways provide access to the storage chambers throughout the site. The containers are placed on huge steel shelves. So. Can the buildout two hundred megawatts now that is enough to take care of the entire north we didnt need for Data Center Capacity that is quite a lot. Two hundred megawatts is. Twenty times a Large Data Center today. That would easily suffice to meet the Energy Requirements of a modern urban center. And theres plenty of room for the data center to expand its modular storage concept. The facility is powered exclusively by locally produced Renewable Energy and its cooling system makes it extremely Energy Efficient. The key element in the cooling system is water from the nearby fjord. Since the data center is located below sea level theres no need to use expensive pumps to lift the water to the Heat Exchangers. Herod left all mine data center we used to fjord on the outside with the cold sea water that they bring into the data center to Heat Exchangers and those Heat Exchangers interact with the coast freshwater circuit that goes all through the datacenter and through the signet that i. T. Areas are too cold pipes coming in with cold water and the earth to halt pipes going out with hold water and here we can see the the pipes going into the container racks and being distributed out to the different containers. With the construction of this Data Center Norway has taken a major step forward into a sustainable Digital Future the country already enjoys a surplus of Renewal Energy and the government sees data centers like left all as an important part of its new Economic Development strategy so they dissenters are about power and large amounts of power are being transformed into bits and bytes transported through a Network Cables rather than power cables norway as a country has a renewable Coal Production ninety eight percent of the power is idle hydro power or wind color this is unique in the global perspective. The left all facility gets its electricity from several hydro power plants located around the region. But not all data centers create such a small environmental footprint. Greenpeace has compiled a report on the Energy Efficiency of besides. Two months on tardiness service on the Supervisory Board of greenpeace germany. Agri business and in it meaning the green peace is one of the few environmental n. G. O. S that has actually addressed the consequences and risks of digitization that last year we published the clicking green study that evaluates the Energy Performance of the id sector they use in a dish form the new guns and informants homes and communicate sensationally what we found that some companies were doing a good job in those as. And apple for example uses Renewable Energy to power about eighty percent of its server and data centers sports and annoy. And a few others Google Facebook and switch at least get half their electricity from renewable sources. By any. Number of Major Players in the information and communications Technology Sector have created a consortium called the green Great Association to improve i. T. And datacenter resource efficiency worldwide. Association member google was one of the First Companies to use Artificial Intelligence to reduce energy consumption. Its deep mind subsidiary calculates data streams in advance which allows servers to function more efficiently. It also helps to reduce the amount of energy thats required to cool the servers but not all i. T. Giants have followed this example. About im going to names much Amazon Amazon the world Market Leader in Cloud ComputingServices Still gets its electricity from conventional sources and that often means dirty coal fired power plants that. Scandinavian companies are leading the way when it comes to developing Energy Efficient data systems. This is interactions stockholm campus where the companys Big Data Center is located. The facility still uses traditional cooling systems that are located on the roof. But these days they function more efficiently. Lot of power and energy in the day the sun and the my theology of that is turned into. Heat that we need to remove from the equipment and that ends up here on the roof and then event. Then a few years back we thought there might be a smarter solution for this than just sending in yeah. These servers run exclusively on green power so they produce heat without emitting Carbon Dioxide. But managing director pedo bank also found a way to plug that supply of excess heat into the stockholm grid so that homes and other businesses can use it. To. These sorts of environmentally friendly concepts has now become standard throughout much of scandinavia. So yeah i think the right way to look at data center in the future is to look at them as a part of the solution not a part of the problem so instead of looking at data send us as as huge installations using all our Renewable Energy only. Then look at them at our smartphones. Its no coincidence that there is a district heating station located near the data center this facility is part of a network that covers about ninety percent of the buildings and start all. Data centers can use heat recovery programs to make themselves climate neutral or even climate. This to feel stock on has a goal to be totally fossil fuel free as a city by two thousand and forty. And the Energy System of the city obviously being a very important part of a city is environmental footprint we as a Company Supporting the city in their goal by making. Ensure that we are. Becoming fossil fuel free by reusing datacenter with. That sufficient energy use until Different Levels first at the point of production and then again at the point of consumption. Its a commendable alternative to coal fired electricity. Well ability of resources of energy is limited so we need as humans as humankind we need to be careful about how we treat the resources from the because they are. They might have an end date. Two months on toews shares that the last fifty so in november he organized a conference that brought together environmental activists and Digital Technology experts. The conference was held at the Technical University in berlin and. The participants discussed how to make the digitize ation process more sustainable. And one of the confident of. The answer we want the politicians to get serious about this. And he put it so far theyve just dealt with expanding broadband capacity or providing Tablet Computers for schools because we want society to play an active role in shaping digitisation and that means the politicians will have to do their part in the new political when i was because im kind of soft on the its one hundred efforts to create Internet Technology thats more sustainable are just Getting Started a number of challenges lie ahead. Right now the four smart roommates are taking time out from their digital world. If more people did that now and then it would help reduce Internet Energy use. To us smart remake to the smart roommates. Its got that. There was a Campaign Slogan in the run up to the last german parliamentary elections that said digitization now doubts later but we think it should be the other way around think before you digitise. People should reflect on how much Digital Technology and how many devices they actually need to live a fulfilled life into that and we had to keep following the maxim as much digitization as necessary but on the whole as little as possible. Into that movie. The fast pace of life in the digital no shift has the lowdown on the web showing new developments and providing useful information the wittiest finds and interviews with the makers and users. Shifts next on d. W. Her first day of school in the jungle. The earth first gloominess of the first. Bendish doras grand moment arrives to. Join the ring in tang on her journey back to freedom to in our interactive documentary. Tour on the rainy day returns home on e. W. Dot com barring a tank. Shift of living in the digital age today and up to ease your transit paints. The picture perfect instagram using. A social media stress but first the pilot