Icelandic datacentres may lead the way to green IT

Greenhouse gas reporting 

One of the stories Verne Global is trying to communicate this year is that as the datacentre industry grows, it can set an example for other industries. One way it can do that is through better reporting on emissions.

While the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol encourages companies to report, there are no specific requirements to do so. There are some standards about how to report, but different industries choose different ways to report.

“Verne Global believes that one way the datacentre industry can lead is through truly open reporting,” said Cantrell. “And we believe Verne Global can be the example for the datacentre industry. It benefits us, because we’ll be able to show that we have one of the lowest total footprints on the planet. Of course, we’ll offset any emissions we have. But that’s not the point. Even before you do offsets, it’s important to consider the impact that you’re making.”

Scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3

The GHG protocol stems from a research paper from 1998 by the world research institute in collaboration with the world sustainable business coalition. There are three ways companies should report: scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3.

Scope 1 reporting is on direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Typically for datacentres this is very small, because they get their power from the grid. In some exceptional cases, facilities do have their own power plant, and they would be concerned with scope 1 emissions. Another case is when datacentres use backup generators that they test from time to time. They would report the emissions from the tests.

Scope 2 reporting is on indirect emissions attributed to the electrical utility company that the datacentre buys from. This will be a very large number for any facility that draws power from a carbon-generating grid.

Scope 3 reporting is on all other indirect emissions that occur across a company’s supply chain. This is where the challenge comes in for datacentres, and most other organisations. Here they have to report on everything their suppliers do. If a supplier drives to the site to provide a service, or if a building has embodied carbon, this has to be reported. If a company generates a product, they have to record the lifecycle carbon usage for that product.

“Scope 3 is very broad, and a lot of companies are not fully reporting on that,” said Cantrell. “And although it’s certainly a challenge to report on emissions from multiple sources that aren’t under your control, it’s essential to identifying and addressing a company’s true environmental impact. We believe there’s a growing expectation that organisations report these emissions, and we attempting to lead that movement by reporting our Scope 3 emissions for 2021 and beyond.”

New synergies: Iceland, London and Finland 

In September 2021, Verne Global was acquired by Digital 9 Infrastructure, a company named after the United Nations’ 9th Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation”.

Digital 9 also recently acquired two other datacentres: Volta, a 6 MW data centre in London, and Ficolo, a data centre operator in Finland.

“One of the ways that we’re going to be able to create synergies with the London facility and the financial services world is that some of the applications will need to be closer to the trading centres,” said Cantrell.

“A datacentre literally in the centre of London, on Great Sutton Street, is well suited to interact with the networks that are going to be there locally.

“If you create good, solid network connections between a central point in a business district and a remote location like Iceland, that makes it easy to start creating this traffic cop approach. That allows you to operate locally on the applications that need to operate locally, but to make a decision to push the work to places that are optimised to the needs of a specific application. You can get the optimal combination of cost, sustainability, and latency.

“Finland is also a developing datacentre market,” he said. “There are some sustainability benefits to Finland over Central Europe and Digital 9 will take advantage of that. From cost and efficiency standpoints, there are some nice cooling options that you can use in Finland.”

Two trends to watch 

Something to think about regarding the future of datacentres is the concept of embodied carbon – how much energy was used and how much greenhouse gases were emitted to bring steel on-site, to erect the steel, to put concrete in place. Builders can think about whether they use concrete, or whether they use graphene-embedded concrete to avoid that carbon cycle.

“The datacentre industry is young and there’s a lot of investment coming in,” said Cantrell. “It also involves a lot of high-tech, so we should invest in ways to reduce our embodied carbon and show other industries that there are unique ways to reduce the amount of embodied carbon going out as we continue to build buildings.

“The datacentre industry can play a part in helping to influence the technologies that people are going to think is second nature by 2030 or 2040,” he said. “Hopefully, what we do now will help reduce the environmental impact expected over the next 30 to 40 years thanks to the increased demand in urban population that will require construction of new buildings with floorspace the size of New York City every month for the foreseeable future.

“It’s also very important for datacentres to be more efficient,” said Cantrell. “Only a small fraction of the world’s datacentres are in the Nordics. Most of the others are still powered by grids that rely on coal or natural gas. We do need to improve energy efficiency.”

The second trend to watch is the use of liquid cooling – directly cooling servers by running liquids through them. The precipitous rise in demand for computing power is driving innovation not only in the construction of datacentres, but also in supercharging the demands of the silicon chips that are the brains behind the power-hungry servers in the datacentres. Chip manufacturers are exponentially increasing the power required to drive each central processing unit and graphics processing unit.

Chips that used to be 100 or 200 watts are now coming in at 350, 500 – and soon even 700 watts per socket – with no end in sight in the increases that datacentre operators will see year over year. This intensity of required cooling will not allow for conventional air-cooled solutions in the datacentres of the future.

Liquid cooling technologies such as direct immersion and liquid cooled cold plate are already available for deployment, and forward-thinking datacentre providers are already incorporating these technologies into their designs. “Our customers will be some of the first to widely deploy liquid-cooled servers for their HPC and AI applications,” said Cantrell. “But since this transition will not happen all at once, our datacentres are designed to flexibly accommodate both traditional air-cooled and liquid-cooled equipment in the same environment.”