The climate crisis has sent companies and governments alike scrambling to lower carbon emissions.
Those looking to achieve Net Zero targets through carbon offsetting may find this an increasingly difficult challenge, especially as the demand for processing power increases through new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Could the answer lie in the North Atlantic Ocean?
Paris-headquartered financial services giant BNP Paribas is one company which has moved its high-performance computing to data centres in Iceland, where cold temperatures reduce the need for power to cool servers and, crucially, the electricity network is powered from 100% renewable sources. It says this has lowered both costs and CO2 massively.
鈥淲e’re all in this together: it’s one planet,鈥� Farice CEO Thorvardur Sveinsson tells 老九品茶Cloud on a tour of the country. 鈥淲hen you think about data centres, and how we want to process data, it’s very rewarding to be able to transport the data to the locations where it’s most economical, and has minimum impact on the environment.聽
鈥淏ut the key for that is clearly good connectivity.鈥�
Sveinsson鈥檚 company has laid three subsea cables connecting Iceland to Europe: the first, FARICE-1, was laid in 2002 to the Faroe Islands and now extends to Scotland; in 2009 DANICE connected it with Denmark; and this year it has activated IRIS, which has its destination in Galway, Ireland.
The latest cable is a game-changer for the Nordic nation as it has a total capacity of 145 Tb/s, compared with 44 Tb/s (DANICE) and 10 Tb/s (FARICE-1).
鈥淥ur network clearly plays an important role: the better connected Iceland is to Europe, the better the world and Europe can use the resources of Iceland to solve the issues of sustainability and climate issues. It’s part of the solution,鈥� says Sveinsson.
Farice is a limited liability company with a turnover of 鈧�13m. However in recent years it has transitioned from a public-private partnership to a fully government-owned organisation, such is its importance.
鈥淕iven the role of the company and the tasks that are performed by us – providing stable, secure connectivity to this country of 400,000 people in the North Atlantic – it’s considered important enough for the government to want to have not just a stake in the company, but fully own it,鈥� explains Sveinsson.
The IRIS cable, which cost 鈧�50 million and took four and a half years to install, was 鈥減urely driven by national security interests鈥�, he adds.
鈥淚celand is so dependent on international connectivity. Even with two connections, we needed the third one for additional redundancies because the idea of Iceland being disconnected from the world is unthinkable. Without it, if we had an outage in one, we would be reliant on a sole cable鈥� that would be a terrible situation.鈥�
The cables are 1.5m below the seabed and carry power which amplifies the signal through repeaters every 100km.
Sveinsson says the seismic activity in Grindav铆k caused by a build-up of magma below ground – which has closed the famous Blue Lagoon geothermal spa for several weeks – has not affected the cables or the company in general. Iceland has the highest number of active volcanic systems in Europe – more than 30.
鈥淥ur system is designed to withstand natural events like the one currently occurring. We have thus not had to make any amendments to our network,鈥� he says during a follow-up interview last week.
鈥淭he cables are all in safe distance from the event.聽 The landing of the cables is carefully selected to minimise natural risk and the marine route does not cross any active area on the seabed.
鈥淲e have not been affected. The event is close to one village with a population of 3,800 people. So the general population in Iceland is not at all affected by the event.
鈥淔rom what we hear from the geologists there still remains a high level of uncertainty in the local region close to the village.聽 Historically these events run their course in a few weeks and then life continues.聽
鈥淭he key thing is that we design our critical infrastructure to deal with these risks and make them as resilient as possible with diversity in routes and resources.鈥�