Due to the growing demand for data – the data centre sector is growing at an astonishing rate. Data centres are some of the biggest energy consumers in the world.
Global commitments to carbon neutrality and net-zero carbon drive environmental regulations while executives push up ESG agendas. Many cloud and data centre operators commit to becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
Data centres consume a lot of energy. Various studies have estimated that data centres consume two per cent of the world’s energy — roughly equivalent to the aviation industry. While progress has been made, designing, developing, and operating sustainable data centres remains a challenge for developers, co-location operators, cloud computing providers, and hyperscalers.
What is a net-zero carbon data centre?
The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) pledge industry players and trade associations of cloud infrastructure services and data centres to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. Let’s see what it requires to make the data centres net-zero carbon.
Measure and increase energy efficiency: Data centres and server rooms must meet a high energy efficiency standard. CNDCP has set an annual power utilisation effectiveness target of 1.3 for new data centres operating at full capacity in cool climates by 2025 and 1.4 for warm climates. By January 1, 2030, existing data centres will achieve these same targets.
Clean energy: All data centres should be powered by renewable energy. CNDCP states that data centre electricity demand will be matched by 75 per cent renewable energy or hourly carbon-free energy by December 31, 2025, and 100 per cent by December 31, 2030.
Water efficiency: Data centres use vast amounts of water for computer cooling. However, a data centre must reduce this to minimum levels by aiming for ambitious water conservation targets to be sustainable. The target of water usage or another water conservation metric may vary based on the data centre design specification.
A circular economy & energy system: Besides repairing and recycling servers, data centre operators should reuse waste heat whenever possible. CNDCP highlights the opportunity for energy conservation presented by reusing data centre heat. Operators of data centres can explore ways of integrating with district heating systems and other users of heat in a practical, ecologically friendly, and cost-efficient manner.
How to create a carbon-neutral data centre
To transition to a net-zero carbon industry, there’s a need to re-think how data infrastructure is planned, designed, and built. The net-zero carbon design approach identifies a project pathway that embeds best practices of sustainable design into every project stage.
The expertise in building design, materials, engineering solutions, construction, and operation can lead you towards a genuinely net-zero project, or more simply to embed sustainable principles and technology to increase energy and resource efficiency according to the business objectives.
Let’s understand it through the success stories of global brands.
Dropbox
Dropbox has reached its sustainability goal and used 100 per cent renewable energy to power its data centres by reducing 15 per cent over the past 18 months. The company could achieve this goal by maximising power utilisation effectiveness, optimising consumption, and sourcing renewable energy. Outside air economisation was used to optimise power utilisation effectiveness to bring cooler outdoor air into the data centre, reducing the amount of power consumed to maintain the data centre at an optimal operating temperature. Dropbox prioritised thermal containment at its facilities, retrofitting existing data centres to eliminate inefficiencies in airflow and reduce wasted energy. They optimised airflow in new construction to ensure that data centres lived up to their new containment standards.
Dropbox maintained an 85 per cent utilisation rate, which they determined to be optimal for efficiency while allowing for occasional power spikes. Dropbox achieved an average power utilisation effectiveness for its data centre that was 17 per cent lower than the industry average. The company created an automated workflow that automatically decommissioned servers to reduce overall power consumption. It estimates the saving of 5 per cent in power over the lifespan of each server. Dropbox company decided to reduce power consumption in idle servers by enabling a state called HDD Standby. Even when disk drives are not spinning, a server can be identified as available for service allocation in HDD Standby. Dropbox also optimised orchestration and diversified hardware to increase density.
As a final note, Dropbox is investing in renewable energy, not only in their own data centres but also through data centres they’ve partnered with for co-location and other data centre services. Dropbox has challenged other leaders in the data centre industry, “As more companies begin their sustainability journey, we challenge them: Don’t take the easy way out and only look for carbon offsets! We believe that all companies can look internally and find other ways to minimise their carbon footprint in the data centre space.”
Splunk
Splunk intends to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a commitment to set a suite of shorter-term 5, 10 and 15-year science-based targets by the end of the fiscal year 2023. Splunk also signed on to SBTi’s Business Ambition for 1.5° Campaign and announced support for the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Earlier this year transparency by disclosing its environmental impact through CDP, a global non-profit that runs the world’s leading environmental disclosure platform.
In addition to the SBTi, Splunk also joins over 2,700 worldwide organisations in declaring its support for the Financial Stability Board’s TCFD, a global set of reporting guidelines that foster transparent and comparable climate reporting. Splunk believes in the power of data to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges, and climate change is one of humanity’s biggest and most pressing collective challenges. Splunk is to advance the climate journey with a fact-based, data-driven approach and build on the previous support for the Paris agreement.
Amazon
Amazon pledged to be net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement. Amazon has announced the Climate Pledge Fund – which will further accelerate investment in innovations for the low-carbon economy of the future. With an initial $2 billion in funding, this dedicated venture investment program will invest in visionary companies whose product and service solutions will facilitate the transition to a low carbon economy.
Amazon is on a path to powering the company’s operations with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025, five years earlier than previously planned. To date, Amazon has 91 renewable energy projects – including 31 unity-scale wind and solar projects and 60 solar rooftops on fulfilment centres and sort centres worldwide. Together, these projects totalling over 2,900 MW of capacity will deliver more than 7.6 million MWh of renewable energy annually, enough to power 680,000 US homes. They plan to continue investing, including deploying 100,000 electric vehicles from Rivian.
Apple
Apple has more than doubled the number of suppliers committed to using 100 per cent clean energy over the last year, accelerating progress towards its ambitious 2030 goal to be carbon neutral across its supply chain and products. In total, 175 Apple suppliers will transition to using renewable energy and the company and its suppliers will bring more than 9 gigawatts of clean power around the world. These actions will avoid over 18 million metric tons of CO2 annually – the equivalent of taking over 4 million cars off the road each year.
While Apple is already carbon neutral across its global operation by 2030, every Apple device sold will have a net-zero climate impact. Since announcing the goal, the company has dramatically increased the number of its suppliers transitioning to renewable energy and expanded the amount of recycled material in its products and established new projects focused on environmental justice. In total, Apple has reduced its carbon emissions by 40 per cent over the past five years. The company added 10 new projects for its first-of-a-kind power for Impact initiative to bring clean energy solutions to communities worldwide. These projects provide renewable power to under-resourced communities while supporting economic growth and social impact.
Global brands like BP, FedEx, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Ikea, Intuit, JetBlue, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Unilever, Verizon and Walmart have also pledged to go carbon neutral — promising that the operations of their businesses will offset the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by some other means.
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