Location, location, location
- The journey of sustainability starts upstream, from the stage of site selection. Jacobs has a multi-criteria analysis framework (MCA) to help with site selection, which considers factors such as energy infrastructure, renewable energy availability, demographics, climate risk etc. A wrong site selection can make sustainability that much harder down the road.
- The AI boom is putting pressure on operational carbon emissions. However, AI compute does not need to be closer to customers, so it is possible to set up these data centers in locations that have either lower cooling requirements or abundant renewable energy.
- Energy companies are proactively pitching the locations with the right power mix to data-center providers.
Carbon reduction toolkit
- There is a whole range of technologies and operational practices that can help reduce the carbon emissions associated with datacenters.
- Some of them are easy to implement but have high impact, such as proper site selection or virtual power purchase agreements. On the other hand, there are hard-to-implement but high impact options, such as mini-nuclear and green hydrogen fuel cells.
- The other technologies include liquid cooling, biofuel gensets, data analytics /AI, performance digital twins.
Embedded carbon
- The embodied carbon, which has already been released by the time a data center comes into operation, constitutes about 20% of emissions over the life span of a data center. 80% comes from operations over the life of a data center. However, as datacenters consume ever greater renewable energy, the operational emission will fall, sometimes dramatically. The focus will then shift to embedded carbon.
- The main sources of embedded carbon are steel, and concrete used in construction. Low carbon impact concrete, which uses supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) with recycled concrete in varying ratios can cut the embedded carbon from 19% to 51%. While they are expensive and not widely available, sufficient demand can create incentives for supply chains for them to develop.
Drivers of demand and trade-offs
- Colocation providers are driven mainly by their clients’ (such as Hyperscalers) requirement for more sustainable data centers. It is also a way for them to differentiate themselves. Regulatory pressures are coming but they are not the primary drivers right now.
- There is less difference between various regions in their willingness to build sustainable data centers, compared with other types of infrastructure. The reason is that a large part of demand for data centers comes from Europe or the US based companies, and they like to see similar quality data centers, irrespective of location.
- Sustainability reduces the cost up to a point by increasing energy and water use efficiency, say from 1.6 PUE to 1.3 PUE. Beyond that it may require a lot of expenditure to reduce it further, and therefore not many datacenters will go beyond that in this region.
- Customers are generally not willing to pay higher prices in Southeast Asia. However, this may change and the challenge for the operators building the data centers currently is to be ready when the demand for sustainability comes. They are making investments in anticipation, to be ready to roll out such services.
Some cutting edge / innovative technologies
- Hyperscalers are experimenting with technologies that may not be ready for commercial use for several years. These include submerged data centers and onsite power generation.
- Microsoft is piloting a hydrogen fuel cell system at a data center in New York.
- Non-toxic coolants are being created in which equipment can be submerged for cooling.
Metrics to ask your suppliers
- PUE remains the most important metric, but end-users should also be asking for water utilization efficiency (WUE) and scope 1-3 emissions of their data center providers.
- Data center operators should be asking for Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) from their equipment suppliers. Most suppliers do not even calculate it, but if data center operators start demanding it, it would build the momentum.
- HPE is rolling out a service called carbon-as-a-service next year which will provide the carbon emission estimates for IT products on a case-by-case basis. A framework has emerged for consistent carbon accounting for IT products, so there is progress.