 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecoms and data center professionals. I'm John Maxleam and joining me today is John Clayes owner of DC on Green over in Belgium. John, thank you so much for talking to us. How are you doing? Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. I'm doing very well. Thank you. Thank you. Look, your work revolves pretty much all around sustainability in the data center space, not just in Europe, but even beyond Europe. How would you describe the current state of the market when it comes to the sustainability? Are we on a journey to really be green by 2030? Okay. Well, I think, you know, after a decade of preparation, you know, with European code of conduct, for example, also a little bit of lip service and creative marketing, I think we have finally entered the decade of actions, you know, all the way up to 2030. And I think the reason for that is really coming from three vectors. One of them is consumers, customers. They all indicate that they are looking or demanding sustainable products and services. I think there was a survey done by 451 indicating that the number one driver for co-location operators to implement sustainability and efficiency solutions is really customer demand. So that's the first one. The second vector, I would say, is competition. I mean, there's a lot of big names, Microsoft, but let's, you know, let's say all the hyperscalers in general are really leading the pack and that obliges the rest to follow. And I think these companies realize that in order to become sustainable, you know, as in survivable, you need to act sustainably as well. So that's a second driver. And the third one, maybe the most important one is legislation and government action. And of course, here in Europe, we had the European Green Deal in 2019, which is really setting the benchmark for the industry towards carbon neutrality in 2030. So I think those three things have made sustainability a hot item. It's really table stakes instead of nice to have. And this is very all. I think the policy point is very important because we are really now seeing government stepping in, especially in Ireland. We've seen it a couple of weeks ago. Quite a few data centers almost being put on hold over power. That's interesting. And actually, as we were just talking, just had a notification coming in from KTS, which is probably the third annual sustainability report. So I mean, it's a hot topic. Everyone is talking about it. But speaking of operators and not just the Microsofts and the Googles of the worlds companies like KTS, Equinix, Digital Realty and then even the boutique big center players, what would you say is the biggest mistake or the one thing they are not really looking at properly when it comes to sustainability? Because as you said, this is no longer about it's a nice thing to have. It's something that you just need to get on with. But what's going wrong still? Well, I think the danger is that sustainability is maybe considered too much of an isolated topic. And that operators might lack the holistic, the system view of things. So in the past 10 years, we had, as I said, the EU code of conduct. There was some focus done with the PUE number and that was it. I think we're now beyond the stage that that is sufficient. It's not enough to have a good PUE. It's not enough to have 100% renewable energy. I mean, it's applaudable, but it's not enough. We need to look at the data center from a holistic point of view, like an ecosystem. A little bit like the nature-based systems. It's an interconnect ecosystem with inputs and outputs. And yeah, I think that's a danger, that it's not being looked at holistically enough. The second one I can think of is, and it's linked to the first one, is the fact that operators are missing out on the IT part and specifically the software part. Because in the past, we've been focusing very, very much on the building and maybe not enough on the reason why the data center building is there, which is the IT load. And I know most co-location operators will argue that, okay, the IT equipment is not their responsibility, it's their customers. But nevertheless, I think we should break that barrier and have more interconnectivity, more cooperation. And I think there's even an opportunity for COLOs to provide additional services in that space by looking at things like virtualization of servers and virtual machines, idle server detection, and most importantly, software. There's an immense potential for green software engineering. There was a report also recently indicating that you could say that 35% of energy by having a green energy efficient design. And luckily, that's also being picked up by the industry with the green software foundation. But nevertheless, I think IT and software is the elephant in the room when it comes to sustainability. So that's the second one. And the third one I can think of is greenwashing. It's never completely off the table. I mean, as I said, the industry has been created with PUE numbers in the past. You now see this plethora of programs around carbon neutrality, net neutral. It's not always clear what the operators focus is, what the scope is, how funded this program is. And I think there's a bit of a danger that it's, again, overshooting. And yeah, not going to the real fundamentals, which is, as I said before, it's looking at reducing the emissions. So it's a net zero objective we have. And this is for the whole value chain. So not only the use phase emissions like, you know, scope one and two, but also most importantly, the embedded carbon scope three emissions for the value chain. And I think that's really some way to go to map that carbon footprint. So yeah, there's a bit of a danger that we are using those terms lightly. So I think those are three interconnected but important observations. Well, I think they are really good observations because I mean, picking up on the last one, for example, scope one, scope two, scope three, we've only really just seen equinix recently announce a strategy to track down carbon through the different scopes. Because before it was always about we just buy green energy or just building a solar power farm or something. It's never down to the detail down to the supply chain down to all the elements within the data center to building and running off a data center. And also the employees. And on the software side, I think it's also a good point because actually there's this going to organization, I think it is an organization nonprofit organization based in Amsterdam or at least in the Netherlands, SDI, which work is basically just coding for data centers to make data centers greener from a software perspective. And they've been getting a lot of traction from companies like digital realtor interaction and everything. So we are seeing the needle moving slightly, but probably not as fast as we would need to. And I mean, we are in 2021. So we've got exactly. Yeah, that's why I said in the beginning, it's really the decade of action. It's, you know, another of the state of the small talk. It's actions. And I mean, there are actions out there. There's also the climate neutral data center pack, which is a very important initiative, which is also moving beyond PUE, looking at other metrics, water and circularity of heat and ID equipment. It's still a work in progress, but a very important initiative. So I think in summary, we need to be ambitious enough about sustainability. And there's one famous, at least while in Belgium and Europe, biologists, she wrote a book about natural intelligence, and she said, sustainability today is just about managing the dysfunction. And I think that's right. It's, you know, isolated solutions. I think the ambition should be to look at the whole ecosystem from end to end, holistically. And this is also actually where OCP and open innovation can play a very important role. It's really tracked the issue from beginning to end, not put on the issue to another person or another company. But speaking of tracking the issues, I mean, DC on green, tell us about DC on green. Where did you come from? I think I think that's quite obvious where it came from for the need of it. But what does DC on green do? What are you working on? And what's the plan for the near future? Okay. Yeah. So my personal background is really while about 30 years in total, if I add everything up, it's 20 years in telecom and IT. And then the last 10 years in data centers, design and build on data centers. So that really comes together in the current danger, which is DC on green, and which is all about the combination of data centers and sustainability. And the name is coming from that play of words. DCs needs to be on all the time. There's no arguing about that, but it needs to be done in a sustainable way. And it is possible today. So the mission of DC on green is really about creating or co-creating a sustainable digital infrastructure and assisting data center operators with their sustainability roadmap. And there's there's two tracks. There's one track is more consultancy. For example, BM assessment of new build data centers, environmental assessment. And the other one is sustainable solutions and products where I really where we act as a sustainability integrator. And one good example there is Ecosense, which is a partner and which has a product about cooling optimization. It's based on artificial intelligence. So again, linking everything, the software layers and the mechanical infrastructure. So it's based on an AI engine with smart sensors, and it will save on average 30% on the cooling energy. But that's one of the partners I work with. And there's a couple of others. And they do love a bit of augmented reality as well. They use a lot of virtual and augmented reality. Oh, yeah, it's like a gaming adventure. I mean, I remember, I think I tried it when they launched a few years ago, and it was quite, it was quite something. Yeah, yeah, it's very intuitive and intrusive as they call it. But if people want to get to know more about this young green and what you're doing, if they want to reach out, where could people go? Where could our viewers get more information? Well, there's the website, of course, these young green dot be. I think that you should work as well. What's information on the, as I said, consultancy services, some of the solutions I provide also some blog with, you know, recent clips of news. And then of course, there's the LinkedIn page, which is also updates both my personal and company page. Yeah, well, I have seen some of your blogs and they are very good reads. So people should have been with them. Thank you so much for your time for joining us as well. 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. And until next time, happy networking. Thank you.