The industry is flourishing in northern Sweden.
It requires large amounts of energy.
At the same time, the need for data centers is soaring.
More and more gadgets are connected to the internet, or so-called cloud services, and everything that happens online requires energy.
Somewhere a server is spinning to offer these services.
- Right now, northern Sweden has a surplus of electricity that can be sent south, but with all the new projects and data centers being built here, electricity will be sucked up.
It leaves much less to send south, says Paul Townend at the Department of Computer Science at Umeå University.
Will find a solution
According to the researchers, cloud services worldwide are estimated to require nine percent of all electricity supply.
Therefore, it is urgent to streamline data centers.
But so far they have not had access to the systems.
- The cloud industry is very secretive and it is difficult to know what they actually do, says Paul Townend.
Ericsson Research Data Center is now opening up for researchers at Umeå University.
They then access data in real time and hope to be able to do something about the large energy consumption.
- We hope to have a big impact, not only on the climate but also financially.
We can save companies a lot of money, but also save the environment from very harmful emissions, says Paul Townend.
In the clip: This is how the researchers will make the "clouds" consume less electricity