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- 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 and retired 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. Initially, that could simply be the number of U-racks. 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.
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