Category

Documentary

Location

Global Energy Group’s Nigg Energy Park facility in the north of Scotland.

Gear

Nikon D850 with a Nikon 17-35mm 2.8D ED lens with pocket wizards to trigger three Nikon Speedlight SB-910 flash guns

Description

Spencer Fowers, a principal member of technical staff for Microsoft’s special projects research group, removes a server from the Northern Isles datacentre at Global Energy’s Nigg Energy Park facility in the north of Scotland. Our internet consumption has an indirect emission which has an unseen cost. The amount of energy consumed by the world’s data centres – the repositories for billions of gigabytes of information – will increase from around 2% of electricity (the same as the airline industry) to an estimated 8% by 2030. Project Natick is Microsoft’s research into the feasibility of an underwater data centre, to determine whether it is logistically, environmentally, and economically practical. Microsoft’s wanted to assess whether submerged datacentres use less energy than those on land. Servers generate heat while operating but work best at low temperatures, so land-based centres demand energy-guzzling cooling systems. The consistently cool underwater environment allowed Microsoft to opt for the sort of energy-efficient heat-exchange plumbing more normally found on submarines. Project Natick team selected the Orkney Islands for the Northern Isles deployment in part because the grid there is supplied 100% by wind and solar as well as experimental green energy technologies under development. The failure rate of components in the underwater vessel was one-eighth of what is seen on land. It is hoped that the overall findings will result in more environmentally friendly data storage both on land and underwater. I photographed the project in the Orkney Islands where the data centre was deployed, and near Inverness where the data centre was opened and the data analysed.

Photographer

Jonathan Banks

Social Media

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Website: www.photo-banks.com

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