Environmentally friendly digitisation with the Blue Angel

Marina Köhn: For the digital world, you need for instance data centres, which are the backbone of digitisation. Whether I send an email or store my holiday photos in the cloud or simply search the internet - at that moment I’m using power from a data centre. And the IT required for this, such as servers, needs a lot of energy. Some data centres require as much energy as a medium-sized town.

In order to save resources, data centres should therefore in future operate in a more environmentally friendly way. But is that even possible?

Marina Köhn: Yes, absolutely. There’s considerable potential for energy savings in data centres. And the areas with the greatest potential can be identified very nicely from the requirements of the Blue Angel. Certified data centres are therefore particularly environmentally friendly, as they reduce their energy consumption, do without climate-harmful cooling and the utilisation of the technology used is optimised. So the goal here is to offer environmentally friendly data centre services.

But of course, each individual should also question his or her own internet use: Do cat videos have to be sent to everyone and every photo stored in the cloud? And maybe a normal phone call will do instead of a video chat!