The alignment of the global IT industry with good sustainable practices in order to **reduce greenhouse gas emissions** is the subject of the second episode of the greenTALKS podcast.
The adoption of [**zero carbon data centers,**](https://www.green4t.com/solucoes/green-efficiency-it-perfomance-services) that act on the high consumption of electricity and the efficient use of resources such as water for cooling systems was advocated by **Alexander Monestel, CEO of DCC Costa Rica** - a green4T company.
Beyond the environmental issue, this type of sustainable strategy represents an immense **financial advantage** for the data center operator, with a **reduction of up to 50% of its costs.**
Check out the whole conversation below, which was mediated by DCC's Commercial and Marketing Director, **Berny Guzmán.**
**Berny Guzmán:** Okay, perfect, let's get started. Hello, I hope you're well, my name is Berny Guzmán. I work at DCC Costa Rica, a green4T company. Today we're going to talk about the Zero Carbon Data Center, **this podcast will be available on our Spotify channel, greenTALKS,** on our YouTube channel and will be published on social media and Whatsapp. In this session, we will have a conversation with Mr. Alexander Monestel, who is the CEO of Data Center Consultores (DCC) in Costa Rica. Hello Mr. Alexander, how are you?
**Alexander Monestel:** Hello, very pleased to be with you and share such interesting and relevant topics for the whole sector of the technology industry and data centers; and the **digital revolution** that we are seeing in full swing today. Very happy to share with you.
**Guzmán:** Yes, of course, and Mr. Alexander and getting into the subject a bit, could you explain more about the concept of a **zero carbon data center**?
**Monestel:** Yes, of course. First, let's understand a bit about the context in which the idea of a data center that aims for **carbon neutrality or zero greenhouse gas emissions** arose, and this has a lot to do with the problem of climate change, which has been one of the most discussed and addressed issues over the last 10 years.
Obviously, as the problem of rising temperatures due to greenhouse gas pollution progresses, so do ocean levels and the effects of climate change.
So countries, companies and people have become aware and, at the end of the scientists' studies, they point out that **not containing the effects and complications of climate change could lead us by the end of the century to a truly chaotic situation** of a rise in temperature in the East of up to 4°C and this will imply a rise in the level of the oceans - which could move in the range of 1 to 10 meters - with which many of the cities and coastal areas of the world as we know it today will disappear.
That's just to name a few problems, but there are many other problems related to water scarcity, an increase in the frequency of electrical storms, an increase in the intensity and frequency of catastrophic phenomena such as hurricanes, cyclones, floods and very severe drought problems in large areas of the globe that will lead to very significant population migrations, an increase in poverty around the world and so on.
So, in reality, what we can expect from doing nothing is a very, very complicated scenario for all the inhabitants of the planet. In this sense, **the United Nations has led the effort to organize all countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions** and this brings us precisely to the concept of a zero carbon data center.
It seeks precisely to **align the technology industry - and particularly the data center industry - in this same context,** that is, how this industry unfolds in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to achieve the targets set between now and 2050 as a first stage, and a further course at the end of the century where, in principle, full compensation for greenhouse gas emissions is achieved.
Therefore, a zero carbon data center is a **data center that aims to be 100% aligned with the global strategy of not emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere** or offsetting the greenhouse gases they are generating.
**Guzmán:** Mr. Alexander makes the general concept very clear to us, but perhaps many of these people are data center owners and are specifically wondering **what is the benefit of applying this type of certification**, for example in a mission-critical infrastructure. Could you talk a bit about that?
**Monestel: Of course. First, we need to understand whether the technology sector or particularly the data center industry really adds anything to the equation of total greenhouse gases produced globally.
There is a study carried out by McMaster University, in which they tried precisely to map the impact of the IT sector at a global level on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. The interesting thing is that, **in 2007, the IT sector** - and the total, not just data centers, but everything to do with information technology - **generated only 1% of all greenhouse gas emissions.** So its impact was really very small.
However, all the projections that have been updated year on year indicate that today the total contribution is three times greater than it was in 2007, when the study began. Even more seriously, **the projection for 2040 is that the IT sector will account for around 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions**.
And this in fact represents half (of the gas emissions generated) in the global transportation sector, so it's a very important issue. And why this exponential increase? Basically, it has a lot to do with the whole digital transformation process.** So the first motivator for an IT manager is: do you want your IT industry to be sustainable over time? Or do you want it to be unsustainable?
So the answer must be yes. Obviously, I want my industry to be able to continue developing, I want to bet on reliable systems that are totally solid, with real-time communication, with the incorporation of all the technologies that come with 5G networks... Of course, as the manager of a data center, I will want this. But to ensure that this is possible, **the IT sector needs to become aware that its impact on greenhouse gas emissions** will be such that, if compensatory measures are not taken, at some point this could probably mean a halt to the development of the IT industry as we know it. Because there is no way of balancing the growth of the IT sector and the detrimental impact it will have on the environment.
The other motivating factor, which is not insignificant, has to do with the **economy of the operating costs** of a data center. It has been more than proven that one of the components that weighs most heavily on operations is electricity consumption, which can represent up to 40 or 50% of total operating costs. When this implies an effort to bring the data center to zero carbon, you are doing nothing other than, within a holistic series of measures, seeking to make this data center very efficient in terms of consumption.
Our experience has shown that I can obtain **energy efficiency savings in the order of 30% to 40% and even 50%,** depending on the level of aggressiveness you want to take. So 50% in the reduction of a data center's electricity bill is a lot, a lot of money, and it's a benefit that goes straight to the operation of the data center.
Finally, there is another aspect that is relevant. Many of the world's existing data centers, especially the large ones, use **water as a resource to cool their critical systems.** So, and precisely associated with the whole problem of the climate change issue, **one of the resources that is expected to become scarce is the water resource.** There are many areas of the planet - in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa - that are already identified or mapped as areas with high stress in terms of the availability of water resources.
Thus, from the point of view of sustainability strategy, a data center that focuses on environmental sustainability will also have to develop strategies that make it possible, for example, to reduce the risks and vulnerabilities that will be associated with limited access to drinking water in the coming years.
Addressing the problems will translate into mitigation measures that reduce the risk of the data center going out of operation because they don't have access to sufficient water resources, due to a collapse of the public water supply system without backup systems to feed the cooling towers.
So there are a series of values that go beyond the, shall we say, clichéd element of certification. In fact, I haven't mentioned the word certification, which we could say gives us a fourth positive point: today, at a global level, **companies that are committed to the issue of sustainability end up being favored or privileged by the public** or by users. In fact, there is an abundance of studies carried out by the Uptime Institute - to name one, the 451 survey - which has identified that many IT managers around the world have favored placing their servers in data centers committed to sustainability issues. These would be the four benefits that I clearly identify in the matter of betting on this type of effort.
**Of course, and in the end it becomes a real commercial competitive advantage. Mr. Alexander, **would this concept also apply to existing infrastructure or new data centers** or both? Could you explain this a little?
**It is important to clarify that this concept is not an exclusive sales or marketing tool for a certain niche, a certain type of data center. In fact, first and foremost, it is a proposal that is totally in line with what the United Nations, prestigious organizations such as the US. Green Building and all kinds of organizations involved in sustainability.
So, of course, it has to be a conceptual framework that is accessible to all types of companies and all types of data centers. To answer the question concretely, **this works for new data centers that are in the process of being developed and, more importantly, it is fully functional for data centers that already exist** and were conceived and designed 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago.
In fact, the real value of this idea of transforming a data center into zero carbon is to open the door to centers that were designed in the context of a time when efficiency and sustainability were not important. Being able to bring them to present value, then, is totally feasible.
In fact, I'd say it's more a question of these old, archaic or, let's say, inefficient infrastructures being brought up to present value. Let's think that most of the data centers that are operational - dare I say it - are data centers that were designed in the 80s, 90s, including some in the 2000s.
And at that time, the number one priority of all this infrastructure was high availability. The question of efficiency and sustainability was a totally irrelevant issue - and we're talking about the fact that this could represent 50%, 60% or maybe 70% of all the data centers that are operational on the planet today. So we could never say that in order to meet the objectives of combating climate change, we would have to shut down all these data centers and start from scratch, because that would be materially absurd.
So, obviously, these kinds of efforts are designed and oriented towards going to all these data centers that are already operating and telling them that they can **remodel the infrastructure and catch up with the efficiency and sustainability objectives.**
**Guzman:** Perfect, well, it all sounds very good, Mr. Alexander, but it's important that we ask you a question - and I know that many of you listening are interested in the subject and want to know. Tell us a bit about the costs: **how much would it cost me,** as a data center owner, to opt for this type of certification? How expensive is it? Tell us a bit about it.
**Well, I'll say it again. The issue of certification is like the icing on the cake. In fact, as I see it, at this critical juncture the first thing an organization must consider is: **do I want to align myself with the goals of fighting climate change that my governments and governments across the planet (are doing)?** Do I want to do it now, with relatively enough time? Or am I waiting to be forced to do so? Through what: state policies, carbon taxes, penalizing inefficient infrastructure... In other words, **this reflection is important, it's not voluntary,** it's not a question of what I would love to do because I have a thousand priorities. It's a question that, sooner or later, will affect all organizations.
Therefore, our recommendation is that the first thing is to find out how advanced your country is, particularly in terms of adopting a policy to combat climate change and, based on that, try to make these migration decisions in advance because these are changes that, more than the cost, have the issue of time, since with a data center in operation it's not so simple, it's not a matter that can be done overnight. There has to be a proposal for evaluating the infrastructure, a diagnosis, an analysis of opportunities, what the most viable strategies are and then, of course, the whole exercise of designing your strategies and implementing them.
So I think the first thought is that **it's not an optional topic,** it's a question of when I'll be forced to adopt it. This need could happen very soon, depending on how quickly the country in which the data center is located deals with climate change issues. For example, countries like Costa Rica, which are leading the climate change debate, currently have legislation or regulations that are stimulating the move towards zero-carbon infrastructure. However, at some point, we will have measures not to encourage, but to punish and penalize. It is therefore important to consider that, looking at the above, there are actually **two efforts towards this goal** of becoming a zero carbon data center.
The first effort is to really **think and identify opportunities.** Defining costs is really very difficult, because it has all the variables you can imagine, depending on the size of the center, the capacity in kilowatts (kW) of that data center, the objectives they want to achieve. There are data centers that adopt very minimal measures, while others are betting on much more aggressive measures, such as implementing all the energy generated by the data center based on clean energy.
So the range of costs can go from as little as US$ 10,000 per year to much more significant efforts, in the order of several hundred thousand dollars, depending, I repeat, on the size of the infrastructure and the ambition of the transformation process. This is very difficult to measure, unless you look at each specific case on a case-by-case basis, for which, let's say the correct procedure is to diagnose the data center and, based on this, you can estimate the effort, which, I repeat, could be in the range of US$ 10,000 to several thousand dollars - US$ 40,000, US$ 50,000, depending on what you want to do.
Now, as far as the certification effort is concerned, the cost is really very symbolic, because most certified entities don't intend to profit from the cost of certification. We're talking about organizations like ISO, organizations like the US Green Building, so certification costs don't exceed, in the worst case, US$ 5,000, US$ 7,000, depending, I repeat, on the size of the building, the data center bunker.
**The biggest effort is in retrofitting your infrastructure,** because it's also very important when we talk about this to understand that the returns on investment associated with these transformations are very, very positive. We have a lot of information that confirms that most of the measures to transform an inefficient data center into a sustainable zero-carbon center have a **return on investment of less than five years.** In other words, it's like saying that what you save - US$ 10,000, US$ 5,000, US$ 7,000, US$ 8,000 - with just energy consumption, water consumption and other elements of data center operations, practically all the measures pay for themselves in less than five years.
We've done studies with the data centers we've designed ourselves where more aggressive measures, such as supporting photovoltaic panels and on-site energy generation, will fully pay for the investment in less than seven years.
So here, the question of investment really has to be seen from all these angles, not just from the margin of how much money it costs me. And the most important thing is that I'm going to have to do it. As well as having a return on this investment in a very short time.
**Yes, of course, and there is also a return on social and environmental investment that I believe is very important for these times. We're already finishing the podcast, Mr. Alexander, thank you very much for explaining this kind of solution. Very interesting.
**With great pleasure, it really is a topic that is becoming more and more valid and that we will see more intensely in the coming months and years, especially if we pay close attention to social networks in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are very strong, very forceful messages, especially from European countries that talk about a concept used even by the World Economic Forum, about a **great redefinition or reboot of the global economy,** betting on a much more accelerated process of migration towards a **fully sustainable green economy.** So I think we will see, when we get through this complicated situation, many initiatives at a global level along the lines of accelerating the processes of migration towards this carbon neutrality.
**Berny:** Perfect, thank you also to everyone who listened to us, we'll soon have another edition with other interesting subjects. Warm regards to you all and thank you for joining us.