 The JSA TV and JSA broadcasts the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Lima and joining me today is Ed Anset, Chairman of i3 Solutions Group to talk through Europe's data center market and its take on sustainability. Ed, thank you so much for talking to me. The European market has been going through so much transformation on every single level, consolidation, M&A, investment, sustainability, ESG, diversity, I mean you name it, everything has changed a lot in the last year and especially on the back of the COVID-19 pandemic even more. But how would you yourself describe the current European data center market? Well, from a point of view of growth and expansion, the market is still very buoyant in EMEA. I think things may be sort of flacking out a little bit in the US but European market is still very buoyant. We'll see a lot of activities in the main countries in the tier one countries but starting to see a lot more activity in the tier two and also pushing across into Eastern Europe. So the market is very busy. It's as busy as it ever has been possibly the busiest so far. I guess another way of answering that question is what what what practice are really dominating and I guess there's the answer that is come back to sustainability but the growth of high-scale data centers is dominant and the emergence and rapid scale up of edge data centers. So those things and then there's the whole topic of sustainability which is ubiquitous, supervasive everywhere. And I'll pick up on that one very soon but just picking up on the tier two markets, which ones have caught your attention over the last month? Well, I mean it's everything outside of the flap and Dublin markets really. It's pretty much every major city and second city in every country that wasn't originally part of the tier one market. So there are very few exceptions and these are large-scale developments. These aren't a few tens of megawatts. They could be more than that, 50 plus megawatts in each of these big cities. What's happening in tier two and some tier three markets is quite extraordinary. I know we've seen it like in Romania, a high-scale campus with 200 megawatts. We've seen another one with nearly 500 megawatts in Portugal. I mean, they just seem to be popping everywhere now. But picking up on sustainability, that's more or less what you majored on if I can say that. What's your take on sustainability in Europe? What's being done here on the continent that you think it's good and what's being done that's not so good? I think Europe is beating a path in terms of sustainability. I think it has for quite some time, originally with the European code of conduct and now with a couple of new initiatives. These are voluntary initiatives that are going on in India. But the market is complex from a sustainability point of view because we've got a variety of fuel mixes which have a big impact in terms of your approach to sustainability. When I say fuel mix, I'm talking about the generation fuel mix. Maybe in some countries, they are important and they've got a very low carbon emission factor, particularly countries that are big on hydro. And there are other countries which still use quite a lot of coal and therefore they've got greater challenges. So I think the approach that's being taken is largely led by government to be fair. But the approach that data center operators know as taking everyone's cognition of the need to be sustainable but they're going about it in different ways with varying degrees of success. But do you think what more needs to be done to achieve all those goals that we keep hearing in the headlines of being 100% green by 2030? The first question is do you think that 2030 is an achievable target to be green? Let's just get something straight. There is no such thing as a zero carbon data center and there never will be. Because the minute you extract any mineral from the ground, you're always carbon positive from that second onwards. So it's really about question of minimizing carbon. When people talk about zero carbon, what they really mean is they've got a carbon footprint. They will do what they can to reduce that to the extent that they can and we can talk about how they can do that. But that's reduction. That's not negation. That's not reduction to zero. That's reduction from some large positive number to a lesser positive number. So what typically organizations are doing is they're employing carbon offsetting. So they're saying we're going to plant a bunch of trees or that we do and then we subtract that from our carbon footprint and that's what makes us carbon negative. There's nothing wrong carbon offsetting. It's a good idea. There is some controversy around it but it's definitely a good idea in general terms. But it shouldn't be seen as a get-out-of-jail card. I don't want to be too negative about it but the way I look at it, it's like paying your big brother to do your homework for you. You've got to also, apart from offset, you have to offset to get to zero. But it's what you do in between then in terms of with your own carbon footprint to reduce it as well, which is the bit that you can control and it's usually the most difficult bit. Absolutely. And how do you see all initiatives that have come into market this year? For example, like the carbon neutral data center pack being one of them. Do you see that with good eyes? Are we going the right? Of course. I mean these are great initiatives. I mean they really are. But I fear that what we need is and we don't really have is a consensus where an agreement where everybody kind of pulls together their status and the buyer, if you like, the data center tenant or end user can see from a comparative point of view which data center operator is doing what and be able to make an informed decision from a carbon perspective. That doesn't exist and I think that would be useful to them. There'll be a complete game changer in the market. And then i3 Solutions Group, what are you guys doing around sustainability because there's a major focus? I mean everyone's talking about sustainability and I guess where we are, a little while ago now, I was talking with one of our board members and he said, you know, nobody in the consulting engineering group, the data center specialist consulting engineering group are looking at publishing information around what sustainable technologies are out there, to those in the energy sector that can be applied to data centers. There's a myriad of sustainable technologies, some of which are applicable to data centers, some aren't. And so we'd be trying to make sense of that. We put together a research team between ourselves in EMEA, ourselves in APAC and our partners in US, EYP. And we formed this research team and the purpose of that research team is to go away and research a whole pile of different subjects, different technologies, analyze them in the context of the data center market and then make some suggestions in terms of which technologies are applicable to data centers, what their impact would be, you know, short-term, medium-term and all of those kind of factors, which are the purpose of that is really to inform from an objective point of view, because, you know, we don't sell anything, we were consulted, so we just give them unbiased advice. So that we call that the greenhouse gas abatement initiative. We launched that memory, I think it was January, this year maybe, it's not early, I'm not sure, about a year ago anyway. And so far, you know, we've published quite a few articles, a number of white papers and we've still got more to publish. Okay, so we can expect a lot more research and consultancy and fact-checked Yeah, in terms of the white papers, I mean, white paper four now, we've got another nine in the pipeline that we're planning, but I think there'll be many more than that. I don't think this initiative is going to stop when we finish those nine. I think we'll have some other things that we'll continue researching and publishing our findings. You're never going to be busy in 2022 with so many white papers. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, but also actually, you know, it's also good for the engineers. Okay, the engineers, it kind of takes them out of their comfort zone a little bit, gets them researching subjects that they're not familiar with. And then they're trying to apply that to the data center industry. We talk about it internally. We sort of kick the tires and try to figure out how we deal with a particular technology in the data center market. And, you know, then it's up to the readers to decide what they want to do. Okay, and then if people want to find out more about i3 solutions and then read about the white papers once they start coming out, where could they go to? Well, so normally what would happen would there be some form of press release each time the paper comes out. But I mean, the central repository for the white papers is the website. So that's just, you know, with white web i3.solutions. That's where you'll find white papers and you'll also find quite a few of the press articles as well. Okay, and then Ed, let's imagine we are at the end of 2022. It's been 12 months, another 12 months of such a buoyant market. What word would you like to use by the end of 2022 to describe the market in 12 months? More informed. Okay, let's see it more informed. I'd like you talk about greenwash, you know, there's a sentence we used before we started the interview, wasn't it? Yeah. And I mean, I think that perhaps means different things to different people, but principally, fundamentally, what we're talking about here is people saying things that they don't do and also sort of papering over the cracks when it comes to doing something from a carbon abatement initiative. I'd like to see the industry more informed about what is greenwash, what isn't greenwash, what's good for the industry, you know, what your choices are. As you remember, at the end of the day, most of the data centers are commercial enterprises. They have to make money at the same time they try to have to try and do something about their carbon footprint. So more informed is what I'd like to see. I don't want to push, I don't want to go crazy and say, you know, we're going to be halfway there because we're not, we've got a long, long way to go. It's a process, it's a long road ahead. But Ed, thank you so much for talking to me. And thank you our viewers for tuning into JSA TV and JSA podcast. And don't forget to check out our social channels for more content. Until next time, happy networking.