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Data Center World 2023

Data Center World delivers expert strategy and insight on the technologies and concepts you need to know to plan, manage, and optimize your data center. Data Center World educational conference programming is focused on the rapidly advancing data center technologies. Click on session titles for full session descriptions. All times noted are in CST (Austin, Texas time zone).

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Beyond PUE & CUE: Innovation in Construction Carbon Intensity Metrics

Bill Hassel  (Data Center Sustainability Program Manager, Turner Construction)

Hashem Izadi Moud  (Data Center Sustainability Engineer, Turner Construction)

Rowan Parris  (Embodied Carbon Program Manager, Turner Construction Company)

Location: Room 10AB

Date: Wednesday, May 10

Time: 2:35 pm - 3:25 pm

Pass Type: Industry Conference, Standard, AFCOM Vendor Member, All Access- BUILD, All Access- Omdia, All Access- Workshop

Track: Sustainability & Mission Critical Facilities Management

Session Type: Session

Vault Recording: TBD

Audience Level: All

Over the last decade, the construction industry has struggled with meeting IT clients' demands for building more efficient, resilient, and sustainable data halls. Shorter project duration, faster turnaround, and more efficient utilization of resources and human capital were the main objectives of data center builders. Data center operators, tenants, and builders' environmental concerns did not go beyond PUE optimization. Optimizing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions of building construction delivery has not been the main concern for stakeholders until recently. The construction industry has been grappling with the problem of measuring and decreasing the carbon footprint of the construction operation.

In the data center industry, PUE, a metric of operational energy efficiency, has been a widely accepted indicator. Recently, CUE (carbon usage effectiveness) was introduced as a metric of operational sustainability, as a proxy for carbon intensity. However, both PUE and CUE fail to show the carbon footprint of the building construction phase of the data halls.

With the current data center industry trend of renewable energy procurement to offset operational carbon emissions, reducing upstream carbon emissions from the construction operation of data halls will become important. A standard metric of construction carbon intensity will promote comparison and competition within the industry, speeding carbon reduction plans. A few newly developed carbon footprint indicators are given and real-world use cases of employing these indicators will be presented.

Takeaway

  • Introduction to the potential solutions to the problem of measuring data center building GHG emissions
  • Understand the processes that can be used by data center builders to adequately measure the carbon intensity of construction activity
  • Explore the newly developed indicators that can be used to measure the carbon footprint of construction activity
  • Learn about real-world experiments in setting carbon intensity goals and using these newly developed construction carbon footprint indicators