GREEN IT & SUSTAINABILITY
It’s not easy being green The data centre sustainability narrative is changing, says Russ Barker, Key Account Sales Director at Vertiv.
ata centres provide the foundations of today’s digital world. From healthcare and educational institutions to financial services and ecommerce, the last 18 months has seen unprecedented activity in cloud migration and digital adoption. As a result, and as evidenced by a recent report by Technavio, the data centre market in Europe will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 20% by 2025. The challenge is the expansion of data centres comes at a time when the need for green credentials is high on the public and business agenda. This, coupled with the fact that data centres consume 3% of the world’s energy, is leading to them developing a power-hungry reputation. Having earned a utility-like status over the pandemic, the data centre industry is under more pressure to take meaningful steps towards reducing carbon emissions. Against this backdrop of expansion and acceleration, let’s look at how operators are challenging the current narrative surrounding data centres and sustainability.
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Setting the green standard One of the largest data centre operators in the Nordics, Green Mountain, exemplifies what it means to be committed to the environment with its DC1-Stavanger facility, located inside a mountain. More than skin-deep, the Norwegian-based colocation data centre has a green exterior that extends to its critical infrastructure. The former high-security NATO ammunition storage facility turned data centre runs entirely on hydropower – and looks like a location from a Bond film. Cooling a facility typically accounts for 40-80% of the electricity required to power servers. Here, Green Mountain uses its natural surroundings to its advantage. The 22,600 sqm facility is cooled by a fjord and nearby rivers with a continuous water temperature of 8°C. The cooling solution is one of the most efficient in the world. It uses less than 3 kW of power to gain over 1,000
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kW of cooling, delivering a significant cost reduction to its clients while supporting targets for energy efficiency. Even the waste heat produced by the data centre is used, with Green Mountain entering into an agreement with Norwegian Lobster Farm to create the world’s first land-based lobster farm – representing an innovative example of a circular economy. And one that delivers a significant carbon footprint reduction. Committed to making environmentally-friendly decisions for the benefit of its customers and community, the facility operators prioritised product and supplier sustainability credentials when procuring a cooling system for a data centre extension. The extension included the installation of chilled water perimeter units in its new data centre space, giving the DC1 facility 5 MW of additional cooling capacity. At its DC3-Oslo site, a monolithic, transformer-free uninterruptible power supply system (UPS) has been deployed. With operating efficiency up to 99% and power density at 1,200 kilovolt-amperes (kVA), Green Mountain was able to achieve the smallest footprint and the highest efficiency available in the market at this power rating. Alexander de Flon Ronning, Design and Product Manager, Green Mountain, anticipates the colocation’s overall power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is already extremely efficient, will further improve. Evolving the sustainability narrative But what if your data centre isn’t located in a mountain by a fjord? How else are data centre operators progressing the roadmap towards sustainability and adopting innovative technologies to monitor and limit their carbon footprint? Here, IT giants such as Microsoft and Amazon are leading from the front. For example, Microsoft, to meet increasing demand for cloud services in Sweden, has announced plans to open sustainable data centres in the region. Powered by IoT technology that monitors energy consumption for renewable energy matching, Microsoft will ensure its facilities operate on 100% renewable energy. What’s more, Microsoft has laid out its ambitions of becoming carbon negative by 2030, and to remove all the carbon it has emitted since it was founded by 2050. It’s put aside a $1 billion investment fund for this purpose. The largest cloud provider, Amazon, has also made gains in its sustainability strategy, co-founding The Climate Pledge, which promises to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It too is continuing to scale up its investment in renewable energy projects, recently confirming nine renewable energy projects across Europe and North America. Already in motion, Amazon’s wind farm projects in Ireland are forecast to add 229 MW of renewable energy to the grid each year. This will reduce carbon emissions by 366,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, producing enough renewable energy to power 185,000 Irish homes each year.