Beyond Energy Efficiency – Life Cycle Based Data Centre Sustainability (Webinar) – 02.07.2020

Digital Climate Emergency Series – EP.2

As the role of data centre keeps increasing, so will concerns over its huge energy use, increased energy cost, associated impacts on climate change and more corporate social responsibility pressures. In recent years, the data center industry has made excellent progress in enhancing energy efficiency and adopting renewable energy sources. However, a sole focus on energy efficiency may cause burden shifting and overlook other relevant environmental problems stemming from other parts of the data centres’ life cycle.

In this webinar, we are discussing a life cycle based approach to assess data centre sustainability and how that will benefit us to designing truly sustainably efficient data centres. We also comparing how businesses understand life cycle approach in the development of efficient data centers and where are the rallying points for environment and business to come together for a sustainable future.

Question:
Could you explain on which assumptions the energy consumption forecast on p11 is calculated?

This prediction is made by combining various industry growth expectations for compute, storage and network (from various sources like Gartner, 451 group, our own market studies, etc.) with data for expected power consumption from leading vendors (Dell, HPE, IBM, Schneider, etc.). It’s by no means intended as or presented as exact science (my apologies if it was perceived that way), rather an indication of the magnitude of the challenge in front of us and in what areas (Edge!) we need to be especially careful wasting critical resources.
Soeren Schroeder, Schneider Electric