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- Data center have high energy use. Energy is a data center's highest operating expense and could be about half of all its expenses. (Uptime Institute's Simple Model for Determing True Total Cost of Ownership for Data Centers.)
- Globally, data centers use 103 Tera Watt terawatt hours of electricity (See Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates), about 1% of the global electricity output. This is equivalent to the energy use of 17 million American households (NYTimes.com) with a total carbon emissions footprint on par with those of airlines (BBC.com)
- Data center energy use can obtained from utility energy bills, many of which are electronically available via the Green Button data standard.
- Major cloud services providers are focused on improving data center energy efficiency, both as a competitive advantage and as a way to meet their climate goals. Microsoft, for example, has committed to becoming carbon neutral, while Google has made both sigificant investments in data center efficiency and renewable energy.
Calculating The first version of a data center's carbon footprint will be done with calculator would use smart contracts in a permissioned Hyperledger channel, as described in the the Carbon Neutral Certification Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The key inputs are, on these inputs:
- Data center meta-data, such as its name and location.
- Data center activity metrics, such as the number of U-racks of servers or the amount of CPU compute units, storage, and bandwidth provided during a time period.
- Utility bills for the data center.
- CO2 emissions of the utilities, obtained from the Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) of the EPA.
- Renewable Energy Certificates purchased by the data center.
- Carbon offsets purchased by the data center.
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The total carbon footprint could then be divided by the activity metric of the data center, such as . Initially, that could simply be the number of U-racks or amount of . An added enhancement would be to break out the equipment of the data center by type, for example by compute servers, storage, and network switches. We can then use their power ratings to allocate the carbon footprint to the different equipment and come up with the carbon footprint per compute units, storage, and bandwidth.
We should Finally, a token or asset could be issued for each unit of activity to the customers of the data center, so that they could use it in their CO2 accounting.
This calculator Note that such a calculator is only calculating the carbon footprint of the existing equipment in a data center. It could be expanded eventually to cover the full Greenhouse Gas Protocol for data center, so that it could be used to certify a "carbon neutral" data center. That would require accounting for all the Scope 3 emissions, including the carbon footprint of new capital assets (servers), employee commuting and business travel, and other purchased supplies and equipment.