 Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from digital infrastructure and data center leaders. I'm Allison Whelan and today joining me is Melissa Relay-Elliot of DC Blocks, a sustainability leader in the southeast United States, and a featured author in greener data volume two coming out Earth Day 2024. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Always lovely to see you. So when it comes to sustainability in the data centers, what are your thoughts on tackling the power issue? So one area that DC Blocks is really focused on is our energy efficiency and management. And all of this has been deliberately designed across all of our system designs, our operational procedures, where we've adopted energy efficient hardware and equipment. We're utilizing the latest advanced power management tools, everything to optimize our energy usage. So because we're designing efficiency in from the ground up, basically we found it's also, it's wonderful that it's resulting in solutions that are also fantastic for the environment. So I will say a lot of our industry is focused on the consumption side of the equation because it's an area that we have direct control for the most part where we can impact. But to achieve a net zero, we also have to be looking at the production side of things. And, you know, this is really a challenge for most operators because not everybody can build a micro grid for power generation. You have to rely on your local utility provider for renewable production. And so I actually, with DC Blocks, this is a fantastic story. I was recently by our Chattanooga data center and driving through, I was right next to a nuclear power plant. I mean, I could reach out the window from the car and practically touch it. And when I was, when I got there, they said actually we have two nuclear power plants and most people don't realize that Tennessee is the largest producer of hydroelectric power. So everything there was already using renewable energy sources and Tennessee Valley Authority, who's the transmission and distribution provider there for all of the local utilities. They also service our Huntsville, Alabama facility. So for several of our sites, this has already been worked in. It was part of our strategic design for where we placed our facilities to make sure that that was embedded. Yeah, that's incredible. Well, I'll have to check out Tennessee. We had a chance to pop into the power panel yesterday. So many different opinions, so many different ways that we're trying to achieve it. But I think we all have that common goal of sustainability. So we're all trying to go in the right direction here with it. And that's what's most important, I think. So data centers around the world are all in different stages of their sustainability journeys. In your experience, what are the common obstacles to sustainability and what are possible solutions to these obstacles? Absolutely. Well, so the biggest obstacle really is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, but that's both a challenge and an opportunity for us. There are so many products and innovations that are available. But the challenge there is we have to assess them. We have to measure them all while trying to implement something that's new. And then the obstacles to measuring the emissions that are associated with it, gathering all of that data. We have a huge lack of personnel that can carry all of this out and implement these solutions. That's going to continue to be a big obstacle if we don't get more people to help us with carrying this out. And then our industry faces this continual need to grow and to scale sometimes before we're actually ready to, as is I think the case with AI. That's going to be a huge obstacle to sustainability. And here, we're still writing this greener data journey as a movement for traditional data centers. And yet, how are we going to manage the new densities that are required? But like I said, every challenge is an opportunity for innovation. So you have a variety of solutions you can at least try. And you can then report and tell others how it's going. So as an example, we use waterless data centers, primarily in all of our traditional core facilities, are all waterless. So we're saving hundreds of millions of gallons of water per facility every year. Yeah. And there's collaboration there too, right, for those opportunities that we create. There's collaboration. That's a big key part of it as well. And then telling others what we're doing so that they can join us on that same journey or see which pieces they can work into their solutions. Absolutely. And just like we will do in greener data volume two, and still time to catch up on greener data volume one before the launch on Earth Day. But in the years to come, what do you see the role of sustainable assessments taking? Well, so we, I will say, we always had our eye towards environmental efficiency and concerns energy efficiency and the like. But we actually found that there was really no substitute for a third party assessment to come in and review what we were doing. Because while we thought we were doing well and good, learning from others and from a third party that's out there assessing others all over the place could really tell us where we needed to improve and where we stood in terms of our peers. So we had Informatech come in and do a deep certification or a deep assessment that stands for Data Center Energy Efficiency Program. So they came in, they reviewed all of our water and energy use, all of our MEP, our operational procedures and processes, and they came away, it was really quite an extensive thing for how they evaluated everything we were doing against other industry leaders. And we actually came away with a Gold certification, which was the highest level certification. Congratulations. Thank you. It was really a great feeling of knowing that we were already doing exactly, we were headed down the right path where we thought we should be headed. But because it's part of who we are to continuously improve, we're not stopping there. I mean, we know that there are still going to be areas we can improve and our spirit of continuous improvement is going to drive us to look for those new solutions because it's a responsibility we take seriously to take care of our environment. It's better for our customers, it's better for our communities and everybody can appreciate making the world a better place. Yeah, and that's very clear how passionate that you and your team are about that. That Gold rank is no surprise here, but thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's always great chatting with you and to our viewers, thank you so much for tuning in to JSA TV, live here in Austin, Texas at Data Cloud USA. Until next time, happy networking.