Webinar Recap | Best Practices in Sustainable Data Center Construction

Summary

How do we build sustainably? Moderator Ron Vokoun, Director of Critical Facilities at OAC Services, posed this question to the panel during AFCOM’s September webinar, sponsored by Watts Water, which focused on best practices in constructing data centers—from retrofitting and expanding old centers to designing and building new ones—with an increasingly critical emphasis towards sustainability.

According to Ryan Ferguson, VP Project Executive of McCarthy’s Mission Critical Group, around 30-40% of a given data center’s overall energy emissions are expended during construction, or before its daily operations even begin. While, as Senior Director of Sustainability at Vantage Data Centers Amanda Abell indicates, this substantial energy cost creates opportunities for a substantial negative impact on a data center’s local environment, it also means those involved with constructing data centers can find ways to significantly curb their overall emissions by innovating the tools and infrastructure we use to build new facilities.

Communication is key

First, however, it’s important for enterprise data centers to publicly acknowledge the means by which they aim to achieve their eventual sustainability goals. In the past decade, just how transparent have data centers been regarding their stance towards sustainability? Bill Winsininski, CEO and co-founder of Cofluence, LLC, states that most data centers have been reticent to be transparent because they didn’t have a great story to tell. This is most likely due to the lack of urgency regarding sustainability in the 8-10 years prior to COVID, which proved to be a massive influence in the data center industry (among many others).

Since the peak of the pandemic, Abell argues, sustainability has been increasingly discussed and emphasized throughout the industry, yet transparency has still been stymied not due to a need for secrecy, but simply due to a scarcity of information. When asked what exactly is being done to meet future sustainability goals, Abell says she hears a standard response from most companies: “We’re building out that answer right now.” Progress is still being made, but for many enterprise data centers, it’s simply too soon to tell what the roadmap to sustainability will look like. Ultimately, “it’d be great to have a renaissance for the industry” regarding sustainable construction practices, Ferguson states, and advocates for ideas like a standardized sustainability framework, such as Informa’s DEEP certification program, for all data centers to follow when building new infrastructure. According to Winsininski, “now is a key time for disruption in the data center industry.”

Collaboration is critical

According to Abell, the biggest challenge for most data centers’ sustainability goals is properly balancing high performance with energy efficiency; one of the best and most direct ways of achieving this is by procuring clean, renewable, resilient forms of energy that isn’t fully reliant on the grid. However, despite the theoretical simplicity of accessing and utilizing renewable energy, solar and wind energy alone simply wouldn’t be enough to offset the enormous amounts of energy that data centers use to match consumers’ increasing demand for data.

As such, it’s clear that sustainable construction will require a myriad of different yet cohesive approaches that all collaborate to lower energy costs. Efforts towards water recycling and conservation, for example, in order to prevent water scarcity in local communities, is a key initiative that many companies can quickly implement. Other routes to pursue include proper waste reduction, restoring biodiversity in local habitats, optimization of existing processes in legacy data centers, and the sharing of information regarding sustainable processes with a data center’s customers so that they, too, can meet their own net-zero goals.

Overall, however, one of the greatest ways that data centers can make a monumental step towards sustainability goes back to proper communication. Multiple panelists acknowledged that there was a clear gap in communication between a data center’s sustainability and financial teams. Those involved with finances tend to worry more about a data center’s capacity, leasing costs, supply chain costs, and ROI over the importance of sustainable infrastructure, which tends to cost more compared to non-sustainable options. This emphasis on cost efficiency over energy efficiency can cause confusion and possible roadblocks for any company that hopes to achieve sustainability in the next decade. Therefore, before the start of any new project, it’s best for all teams involved in data center construction to sit down and hash out the ways in which infrastructure can be sustainably built without breaking the bank.

AFCOM has made a full recording of this webinar available to the general public. To view it, simply click here.