By Valérie Mitan, Executive Vice President and Head of Sustainability, NZero How do you satisfy growing energy demand while also lowering emissions, managing costs and meeting regulatory requirements? It starts by measuring everything.
From ordering coffee on a mobile app to filing an insurance claim to accessing medical records to uploading an Instagram photo, there is scarcely a transaction or interaction in our lives that isn’t dependent on data centers in some way. Were they to magically disappear tomorrow, our day-to-day experiences would be radically different.
Yet, while they’re critical for enabling modern conveniences and business operations, data centers are also massive energy consumers. Estimates put their total global electricity usage at anywhere from 1 to 1.3 percent1—a figure continually rising in tandem with the digital economy and one that has placed them squarely in the crosshairs of sustainability discussions. A March 2024 New York Times article shone a glaring light on data centers’ environmental impact, citing research that suggests data center electricity demand could triple by 2030 in the United States alone.2
This stark prediction likely came as no surprise to enterprise leaders who have been struggling for years to balance increasing customer energy demand with ever more stringent regulatory requirements and intensifying stakeholder insistence to do better by the environment. These converging pressures, along with mounting evidence that sustainability makes bottom‑line business sense have led many organizations to make concrete, often aggressive and, in many cases, very public “net‑zero” commitments—pledging to fully neutralize their carbon emissions by a set future date.3,4 (See also, “Seeing the gold in going green,”.)
But between that looming deadline and present-day reality, there can be a yawning chasm of confusion, frustration and uncertainty. Leaders charged with reducing their carbon footprint know what they need to do. They want to do it. They hear the clock ticking. But often, they aren’t seeing fast enough progress from their efforts... or they simply don’t know where to start.
1“Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks,” iea.org. 2Plumer, Brad and Nadja Popovich, “A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals,” The New York Times, March 2024.
3TheClimatePledge.com 4Race to Zero campaign, ClimateChampions.unfccc.int
The solution to both challenges can be found in the same source organizations rely on to inform decisions and drive action across virtually every other area of the business: data. Finance, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Human Resources—they all depend heavily on rich, reliable, relevant, up-to-date data to achieve their target outcomes, often deploying highly sophisticated mechanisms to capture, measure and analyze it. Applying the same rigorous and advanced data-centric approach to decarbonization in the data center and beyond is the key to fulfilling your plans and pledges.
Three advantages of a data-driven journey to net-zero
Many enterprises rely on internal teams, usually working outside the scope of their roles, to patch together a disparate blend of manual processes, outdated static averages, and automated but disconnected reports to arrive at a picture of their consumption across the data center. This can leave substantial room for error including missed decarbonization opportunities, inaccurate emissions accounting and a costly lack of alignment between efforts and real-world conditions. My company, NZero, has seen reporting error rates as high as 25 percent for clients using such processes. These kinds of miscalculations can come with a hefty price tag: regulatory penalties, increased insurance premiums, misspent investment—the list goes on.
Independent, comprehensive assessment tools that integrate real-time data collection with analytics can significantly reduce those vulnerabilities. The right information, expertly collected, measured, analyzed and reported through an automated, repeatable, transparent and scalable process will give you three key advantages in carving a net-zero path that is ambitious, actionable, achievable and sustainable at every step of the way:
1)
An accurate, clear-eyed starting point
As with any journey, getting your data center to net-zero requires knowing how far from that destination you are today. That means comprehensively assessing all aspects of your present-day energy consumption—everything from IT equipment load, power usage effectiveness (PUE), energy sources and cooling systems to equipment efficiency, virtualization and server utilization, as well as building and infrastructure design.
Advanced carbon management platforms can give a deeply granular view of your direct environmental impacts—or more broadly, one that encompasses indirect emissions (known as Scope 2 and 3) as well—and reveal areas ripe for targeted intervention. NZero, for example, automatically gathers hourly energy usage data for each asset, then refines and normalizes it to display emissions and costs across locations. By continuously tracking emissions targets and changes over time, you’ll have a thorough, highly precise overview of your current carbon footprint and validated guidance for the path forward.
2)
A realistic, responsive blueprint for action
A complete, honest, data-backed accounting of your current data center emissions enables you to see much more clearly—and with far more confidence—where and when the highest-impact changes can be made. From that vantage point, you can set decarbonization goals that are right sized to your unique circumstances, strengths and limitations, ambitious enough to drive meaningful change, and more readily endorsed by stakeholders.
From there, it’s time to act. Hyper-accurate real-time data, combined with advanced AI-powered algorithms provides deep insight into your unique load profile and seasonality, and can reveal countless ways to streamline operations and unlock ROI. Predictive analytics, for example, might adjust cooling systems preemptively or shift workloads based on renewable energy availability, enhancing operational efficiency and sustainability. Machine learning algorithms can optimize server usage, consolidating tasks during low‑demand periods.
Achieving data center sustainability isn’t a one-and-done proposition. The sustainability landscape is constantly evolving, as are customer demands and business priorities, and your data center needs to keep pace with it all. Advanced carbon management platforms can continually track progress across scopes, targets and points in time, validating the effectiveness of your sustainability efforts, maintaining your progress, and identifying new areas of risk and opportunities for improvement that may arise.
3)
Enhanced credibility and audit-readiness
In today’s generalized climate of misinformation and generative AI-fueled suspicion, transparency and trustworthiness are invaluable commodities. And when it comes to sustainability in particular, the prevalence of greenwashing—companies misleading the market about their ESG practices through false or unsubstantiated claims—has only intensified the scrutiny applied by regulators and stakeholders. The ability to deliver concrete, objective, up-to-the-minute details on your data center decarbonization progress and outcomes will strengthen your reputation as a committed sustainability leader, which can increase your attractiveness to customers and investors.
Some carbon tracking platforms only provide raw data, leaving users to manage their own reporting and absorb any associated costs. Others, such as NZero, incorporate greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting as a core feature. This can save you time and money by ensuring an audit-ready data trail is readily available. And a platform that allows the easy exportation of reports in alignment with global standards such as TCFD, GRESB, CDP, SASB and GRI, will help you stay compliant with environmental reporting regulations, even as they evolve and update.
Letting data lead the way
Given their centrality to modern business and life, data centers aren’t going anywhere. Nor can they continue their current consumptive trajectory. Committing to a path toward carbon neutrality is becoming less of an ideal for enterprises, and more of a must. But not all decarbonization efforts are created equal.
Businesses long ago learned the immense value of a data-driven approach to solving problems, surfacing opportunities and making decisions. Decarbonization should be no exception, especially with the stakes as high as they are today. With the right partner, tools, technology, systems and support, your data center can meet the growing demands of the digital economy and rapid pace of regulatory changes while upholding your commitment to environmental sustainability—and your teams can be freed to focus on the activities that differentiate and drive value for your business.
