 What's become a very important topic for our industry, for our planet actually, which is sustainability. The topic of sustainability will also be covered in depth in volume two of our now well-known book, Greener Data. The first volume of this book, Greener Data launched in 2022 and we have volume two coming out on Earth Day 2024. It's already, the first volume is already an Amazon best seller, so we're looking forward, I think, to volume two coming soon. And today moderating today's discussion, we have our friend Rob Powell. Rob, thanks for joining us. Rob is the editor of Telecom Ramblings. And so without further ado, I'd like to pass this over to you, Rob, to kick off today's panel, which is entitled New Year Predictions for Infrastructure and Sustainability, what you need to know in 2024. Thank you. Thank you, Barb. And thank you to JSA for providing this unique platform. Hello and welcome to everyone to today's round table, New Year Predictions for Infrastructure and Sustainability, what you need to know in 2024. When I first got involved in this industry, the building of infrastructure was about what, where and things have certainly changed now and now more than ever it is more about how and why that seemed to dominate the discussion. As we build ever more facilities with ever more dense computing power, the questions of environmental impact and sustainability are among the most important questions we have to address. This has also been the year AI is broken into the conversation in a really big way, and the people involved in it are all dedicated to sustainable infrastructure, but at the same time, the AI is almost like the environmental cousin of Audrey from Little Shop Forer's. Feed me sustainably. Every year we improve, but every year we need to get better at it, it seems. So what's ahead in 2024? We have four distinct or three distinguished panelists here today to talk about it. Let's give each a chance to quickly introduce themselves. First, we have Jay Lawrence, CEO at Equus Compute Solutions. Jay. Hey, thanks Robert. So just as Robert said, I'm the CEO of Equus Compute Solutions. The name kind of gives it away that we are in fact very much on the compute digital infrastructure side. We are going through quite a renaissance in our space in the sustainability area. We'll talk about that with the Q&A, but as I always introduce myself to folks, I'm a nerd in a suit and I love the science behind what makes all this stuff answer the questions of why. Nice. We have Bill Severn, Executive Vice President at 162032, Farnham. I always convert those. Bill. Thanks, Rob. Bill Severn, Executive Vice President, News Press and the ZEC Company, parent company of 1623 Farnham Carrier Facility in Omaha, Nebraska. Glad to be here. And we have Dave Sterlase, Account Director at Global Data Centers at Hitachi Energy. Dave. Hi, yeah. Dave Sterlase at Hitachi Energy. We specialize in power infrastructure, so everything from grid interconnect to renewable integration, digital controls, microgrids and energy storage systems. Great. Let's just jump right in here. Before we talk about 2024, let's talk a bit about where we are now in the infrastructure space on sustainability. Not a days goes by that we don't hear about steps taken to lower carbon footprints, water footprints or otherwise interact better with the environment and society. What are we doing well at today and what are we not at the end of 2023? Let's start with Bill. Thanks, Rob. You know, as I think about this, it makes me think about, you know, the narrative out there today, if you talk to most folks is that the data center industry is really only focused on this for the last several years. But in our company, I remember 15 years ago, we set green initiative goals company-wide and tracked those. And so I think we've really been a leader in this initiative for a long time that, you know, recently, I think we've expanded our focus much greater, set deeper goals in the industry. And I think the thing that we're doing well today is we're driving innovation. I don't think our innovation from a carbon footprint reduction will ever be at the pace of such as AI. But we can drive the innovation to be very close behind it. All right, Jay, how about you? Yeah, so I think, Robert, as you asked the question, what have we done good? I think first and foremost is we're more aware now as an industry and I'm a free market guy. So I look at this and say the industry has got to have the profit incentive in order to make these things work. From the ECS side, you know, we've launched ourselves into really three focus areas as part of our forward strategy, which include the five and six G telecoms world. Of course, we're focused on AI and then cooling. We all know that the power consumption of these chips is just going up geometrically and they're getting denser and denser. We know that the availability and the cost of power are going in the wrong direction, less power available and it costs more, at least for right now. But even when it doesn't, you still want to use it wisely. And then ultimately the demand, you mentioned AI, but it's AI today, it's going to be called something else in 18 months. AI will of course be there, but there'll be other things. And five G by the way, I think is gonna be a catalyst for that. The other thing though, that I think that we're starting to get more understanding of is what five G is and what five G isn't. You know, a couple of years ago, it was an inconvenient ad that made the football commercials longer. Now we're starting to see real applications come out that really drive needs to the edge. So when it comes to the data center, the data center structures of today, I think that's shifting away from the big behemoth facilities. More edge will be required to make that happen. You're going to have all the same problems though with the edge that you have in the big buildings in terms of how do you cool it? How do you protect it? How do you put cybersecurity on it? And then how do you optimize for the workloads that are more specific and more delineated as you migrate into edge use cases. So the fact we're talking about, it's good. And I think 24 is going to have a lot more promise as well. Dave, look from the energy side of things. Well, I'll go on to what Bill and Jayvara said. First of all, what Bill said is we have been innovative. We have been working hard. This isn't just a two-year issue that we've been looking at becoming more sustainable. So a lot of folks, it's certainly becoming more to the forefront. And it's what Jay was saying. I do think that it's going to rely on us and we are going to have to drive this innovation through our businesses. So from our perspective, I think, and also what Jay said around power availability, there isn't, we're not adding generation as a general statement in the US, for example. So how can we use that power more effectively? How can we get it to where it needs to be used? That's a big question. And then once it's there, how do we use it more effectively? I think that all this, we need better controls, better ways to deal with that. And we're just starting to see data centers go from being what was the ideal consumer of energy a very flat base load that utilities love to being something with a more dynamic variable load based on different workloads that we're seeing now from things like AI from different telephony. And I think that that is going to require a much tighter integration between the data center and the power provider. But yeah, I think that, and we've all seen yesterday in New York, the Wall Street Journal published an article that said, I'll read the headline so I don't blow it, so it's on this screen. Bitcoin mining use more water than New York City last year. So that we're not in Bitcoin mining, none of us, but that kind of puts a black eye on the industry. There's going to be increased things like that. And we need to get the word out in a better fashion to tell folks what we're doing in my view. All right. So for 2024, what kind of projects do companies in your ecosystem, yours, or the ones that you work with? What do you see that they have in mind for 2024 in terms of infrastructure, sustainable infrastructure? What are the goals? I'm thinking of a specific project so we can sink our teeth into some stuff. Jay, how about you? Yeah, happy to start. I actually want to just kind of amplify something Dave just said when you look at the fluid that's being, the water that's being evaporated and whatnot. There's another great metric too, which is chat GPT today. I think there was a statistic that said it consumes as much power as a small metropolitan area to do the same thing that the 20 watt human brain does. So you kind of have to frame these things though in that sort of context because it's meaningful. Contrast matters, contextualization matters. As we look though to 24 to get to your question, as I mentioned, part of our three planks of our key strategy, one of them is cooling. It's the biggest problem in our view in terms of the compute going into data centers and there's not a one size fits all of this. We've got, so we have a big innovation platform as part of our efforts as well. We've got a liquid lab in our Southern California facility where we're right now working with all sorts of different cooling technologies from rear door to direct to chip which had been somewhat well known and more established but also getting into the full immersion. In fact, this morning we just got off a program that's in flight right now for 2024 which is an immersion program. We lit this thing up this weekend. It was measured PUE of just about 1.03. Now you get into some challenges though. This is kind of the buggy whip Model T thing where you can't just say snap your fingers and all this stuff comes to reality. There are, I think people diminish this but the real world, how do you make it fit? Because data centers have their requirements. There's all sorts of concerns and risks as you start to evolve into new tech. And of course the edge creates an entirely new set of problems that we're addressing. So at the ECS level, we're doing a couple of things. One, driving the innovation through board development, through technology acceleration and the like, working with partners in our ecosystem that create those technologies, whether it's tanks, whether it's fluids, whether it's other sorts of componentry that goes in because we do have a integration and solutions engineering capacity to us. But then there's also business model issues. How do you warranty some of this stuff? How do you install it in certain facilities? What's the footprint and the form factor look like at the edge versus at the core and then all the various 5G layers and soon to be 6G layers that are gonna drive a far more diverse and disaggregated telecoms network. Which by the way, we're all serving. We're all masters to the telecom network at the end of the day because if we're not transmitting data, all this stuff kind of becomes a little less relevant. So we're looking at getting projects that one, we can demonstrate works because works can't cost extra in the immersion spaces of single phase and two phase immersion cooling. We're developing, we've already deployed but we're now designing for instance adapting to the compute platforms that go into those tanks that are purpose built and form fit and function specific, very bespoke in our approach. And then we're looking at the revenue models. In my opening comment, I said the key thing right now and I'm gonna come back to this because I'm a free market guy is the profit incentive has got to be there. Government cannot regulate or bail out green energy. The free market will decide what the right way to do it is. And my view in our strategy is to say there's ways that we can actually save a ton of power actually extend the life of the compute platform work in concert with current data centers while helping them expand their capacities forward in a very much of a building block Chinese menu type structure where we pick the right tools for the right job and don't put square pegs in the round holes. And I think demonstrating that in 2024 is not just something we're thinking about we've already done it. Now we're gonna start doing it more at scale with partners and hopefully we have a chance to do this again this time next year and we can report on some of those outcomes which will be massive density improvements meaning 20 racks goes down to five or six. Power consumption goes down 40%. You're talking about fluids that protect the life and longevity of what's being dunked in those tanks. And all by the way, because you have that you have more power you can actually throttle these things all the way I someone talked and Dave mentioned coin miners biggest problem they have is they wanna overclock chips. Well, if you can't get all the power because the heats throttling things back it's like buying a Ferrari and putting knobby tires on it to go off-roading. Yeah, you can do it, but why would you? So we're gonna get into that optimization lane about how we deal with the thermals because that's where most of the pain I think exists and where most of the opportunity will actually be developed from. Dave, what are you seeing? What projects are you seeing out there for the 2024? Well, I think from a manufacturing perspective the biggest thing we're working on is we're calling it carbon-free manufacturing. So all the products supplied by us will be manufactured with carbon-free in carbon-free environments. So that's good. Now that of course there's still steel and then transformer and things like that but at least for folks looking at their full scope they can see that we're trying to contribute to that. So I think that's one important thing we're doing. We also have expanded our portfolio in terms of digital controls and digital protection. So we can automate some of that in terms of substations and bringing disparate power sources online renewables and balancing that with some real-time aggregators so you can actually see where your power is coming from and what it consists of in terms of energy mix, whether it's nuclear, renewable, whatever traditional methods might be. So that's that. We also see and we're putting this, now this is a little removed from data center business right now but I think it's gonna come in, we'll probably see pilots in 24 around what's called ETRM, Energy Trading and Resource Management. So again, I mentioned earlier we were thinking that the data center just because of the changing loads will become more of an active participant and this is a way to do that with the power providers. And I think that many of the utilities already have this in terms of their transmission and distribution networks. So I think we'll start to see more of it. And then through the big load increase from things like AI and advanced machine learning, all these can work together to make things more efficient as well as on the operation side. So I think that I brought up the coin mining thing just because it's, we see a lot of negative press. This is another thing where AI, we're gonna see a lot of negative press. It uses, it's gonna take over the world this stuff. It can also make us a lot more efficient in how we source, use and power our data centers. So I think that that's something that'll be coming to the forefront very soon. Bill, what are we seeing in the data center itself? Yeah, I'm gonna come with this, I'm gonna come with this from kind of an interconnection facility, a high rise urban environment, where most most facilities like ours have their mechanical and electrical already in place. So we're coming at this from individual goals to try and improve what we're doing. You know, we're, we just retrofitted the building, you know, two years ago, let's say, the design allows us to free cool when the temperature is below 50 degrees in Omaha, Nebraska, which calculates out to about 4,000 hours a year. And, you know, we're engineered to certain set points. And so we have goals throughout the year this year to challenge those set points so that we can potentially gain another 10% of hours. So another 400 hours of free cooling. So as Dave said, you know, the amount of water being used in the United States, whenever we free cool, we go off the municipal chilled water. So we accomplish both what Jay said, higher cash flow, which is important to us and we reduce our water consumption. The other thing that, you know, a couple other points, being in an urban environment, we share an entire alleyway, a whole block. And, you know, as you walk through that block week to week, it is amazing the number of dumpsters that are full of non-compressed cardboard boxes, where you couldn't even throw another bag trash in. So we have an initiative with all the owners of the properties in the entire block to try and install a cardboard recycling compressor in 2024. So not only reduce our impact, but to reduce the entire block. And I think that could be done in an urban environment much more than it's done today. And then if I look at data center facilities or high rise around the country, something that we did a couple of years ago, it's not a 2024 project, but I think it, you know, it could be beneficial for the industry because we installed a 98% UV film on every exterior window in the building, greatly reducing heat load that comes in thermally through the windows. And it's not a common practice that I see out there, but it's one that can make a big difference. So that's a few initiatives there, Rob. Right. Along with our own initiatives, we're being dragged along, right, by the demands of the sector, including AI. How do we stay ahead of the never ending growth, you know, demand for growth in that and, you know, keep our upgrade cycles, just, you know, not taking shortcuts. How are we taking a look at that for next year? Dave? So from our perspective, it's tough. We just can't, there aren't enough, you probably heard it from a lot of vendors, and I'll apologize to my fellow panelists, but we just can't conjure up certified welders out of the air to make transformers for us. And we're trying, believe me, we're trying, we're putting all kinds of money in plants and expanding, and we're starting to get there, but it's tough to keep up with demand and demands showing no signs of leveling off, you know, I think our, the proverbial hockey stick keeps getting, I don't know if it can turn around backwards on itself, but it seems some days that that's what's happening. So we're trying to do that. That being said, there are some ways to do things. So we try to modularize and streamline and create a global design for different items. You know, we know a lot of folks use, you know, three MVA for a block in a data center. So we try to standardize around things like that, but it'll be more useful for them. We are improving. We have changed materials and manufacturing processes to speed things up, but there's still a constraint. The problems we had beginning of last year around shipping have mostly alleviated. We do, we've gone to global loading of things. So your transformer, which would have been unheard of a few years ago because they're so big, you know, to ship from pick a country from South America up to US, we can now do that and we now do that routinely. So we're trying to make designs that are globally and have UL slash ANSI certified all over the place. So that's an example of some things we're doing, but it's a powerful, powerful problem to confront. I'm sure we have plenty of smart people working on it and we're getting better slowly. So our demand, while increasing, we have been able to actually catch up. So that's a testament to the work that's being done. And I think our peers are also starting to be able to do things by doing things more modulary, more innovative and that's certainly happening. So I guess my comments will be, what can you do while we simplify? We make as simple a black box as possible. We use digital controls on it so that it's easy to configure onsite and configure for different applications. We use things like consolidation and prefab to limit onsite work and kind of streamline the timeframe from now as well. So that's really what we're trying to do. Bill, how do we keep up without taking shortcuts this year? Wow, I was at a conference recently and had a number of meetings with several of my peers where we own and operate facilities that maybe have been design engineered and ran for say a five KW per cabinet from a cooling perspective. And now we're having discussions of 30, 40, 50 KW cabinets and how do I put them in my facility? And so I'm encouraged by some of the innovation that several companies are taking, whether it be the trials of liquid cooling like Jay talked about, there's a number of trials going on in legacy facilities. In our facility alone, we've dedicated one floor and we're engineering solutions to be able to meet those higher demands that are outside of our original design. So those are big challenges, but I think we're all trying to solve them in unique ways. Jay? Well, it's an excellent question in that, I always like to say works can't cost extra. And this is why I think it's so important that this is a problem that gets solved in the free market. Dave brings up a good point. He mentioned you can't just have welders drop out of the sky and magically produce more production capacity. So I think there's gonna be a bit of a lag and kind of a bit of a horse race backwards and forwards in terms of what's in front in terms of the biggest opportunity and at the same time, the biggest problem. Right now today, if you're in our lane and you're looking at certain chips, for example, you still have some processors that have almost a year's long lead time. Well, how do you build a business model around that? It's really difficult. But at the same time, going back to free market forces, you now have multiple people or multiple parties and companies investing in creating some of that compute power. Of course, that compute power drives all the downstream considerations, but it's a good metaphor for what the free market can and can't do. So I always say more free market, less government. We'll figure it out ourselves because we have the profit incentive to do so. But, and we have customers to take care of that are gonna drive it. And I do think that there's a good, most of the people I at least engage with are really good corporate citizens and wanna do the right thing and understand that this is, it's not just that we're being kind of forced into having to do it because of some of the power situations and Dave referenced it and build it as well in terms of going from a five to a 30 K Y cage. We're actually causing some of that problem. So Bill, I'm sorry. It's not an on purpose, but it's life. But it's also being driven when I made my opening comments about where we're focused. I say 5G because we really haven't seen the benefits and the promise of 5G yet. I mean, we're seeing pieces of it come into play. But if you're in the data center world where Bill sits, I would bet they're thinking about, what does 25 look like? Because there is a big facilities question that I think is gonna go outside building the 300,000 square foot buildings into small boxes that are under cell towers or in shopping malls or in college universities. But those are things to the question though that I think will be accelerants. It takes a little bit longer to build a massive facility than it does to take some unused space and make it a data block. By the way, that kind of thinking which free markets can get you to also complies more with the 5G standards with 3GPP. What does it say? Well, you gotta have more availability and reliability. Well, that standard says five nines. And I always say that there's two things in life that I can determine are five nines. One is death and the other is taxes. I don't see any network or distribution or of anything else getting to five nines. I mean, if we get through this entire program without the internet here at the home office glitching that might be somewhat of a miracle. I think we all can appreciate that coming out of COVID. But the other bits that fall into that standard is latency. So you start having also to move closer to the edge and that creates again facilities and design and other accelerants because the business model changes. And I think we all make a mistake if we just think this is all a technology question. Again, I'm a nerd at heart. I mean, I love the engineering side of it and I love getting into the weeds of how does it all work? And I think Robert, you asked the question. It's now more of a why than when and where in this day and age. But part of that why is, why would a company want to be involved to invest to accelerate? And that goes back to the profit incentives. The other piece though that I think is really important is education. And I think this is an incumbent requirement and obligation of industry is that we need to as often as possible be talking to people about what is real and what is just utter nonsense. Because there's so much confusion about where the real efficiency opportunities lie out there. And I'm from California when I talk about green, people think I'm off the far extreme of things. I like green things that make me more green, meaning dollars. And by the way, my customers like that and my partners like that. And that means you can reinvest those dollars into the next best thing. But that education piece is essential. Folks don't understand. I talk to people about immersion cooling as one example. They think, oh, you're putting it in water. No, we're putting it in vegetable oil. I mean, we've got some materials you can eat. I don't recommend it, but you can because they're natural, non-toxic liquids, completely safe, completely no flash points. They're not gonna catch on fire. But there's an education that has to go there because people see this tank that's bubbling because there's a hot bunch of computer boards in it. That's a knowledge gap in terms of what that means and why that's important. The same for the power generation. Both guys have said the same thing. I'm gonna repeat it here, but as we look at our path forward, I'll be the first person to say, cranking up more coal fired plants is probably the last thing we wanna do, but we do have a great resource of ways of doing small form factor nuclear reaction in the very near future. It's clean. So I think we have to weigh the common sense in this, but this is something that I think industry can do quite well. And I think, again, as a bunch of folks that are trying to be in the profit lane here, we've got a responsibility to also make sure that we're educating. So I think the reality is, is we're gonna be playing catch up in certain areas for a while, supply chains still not perfectly fixed. And there's technology that has to be developed to get us there, but we can also make great strides without having to split the atom or find Marty McFly and his flux capacitor to get there. So I'll close on that thought, but I do think those are kind of the key things in terms of how do we accelerate in 24? And of course, with Moore's law being about 18 generations out of style, if things are changing so rapidly, we're now looking at things quarter to quarter instead of every two years. And that's exciting all by itself because the rate of change has gotten to that point. In a round table last year around this time, I asked how we can measure success towards sustainability goals beyond the press release. As we move into 2024, I'm gonna ask the same kind of thing, how can we tell how well we are doing as opposed to announce how well we say we're doing, both as individual companies and as a sector as a whole? Bill, let's start with you. Well, Robbie, but one, it's a great challenge because you've got both public and private companies in the sector, right? And then you've got purpose-built, purpose-built new facilities that are being built that kind of like to Jay's point, he talked about 1.03 PUE. In my 1974 retrofit high-rise, if I ever saw PUE of 1.03, we'd be doing cartwheels, right? So we have to be careful about, I think we have to be careful about how we measure different types of facilities in the industry. And there's no real benchmark out there for that today. As my customers come to me that are comparing a purpose-built facility to a PUE that either I can get to if I'm running my facility correctly, I think that's an area that we've got to get better at is recognizing what are good standards for different types of facilities. And I think that's the real challenge before we can really say as a sector for whole, how are we doing? Because if I read the press releases out there in the last 90 to 120 days, every project has a B behind it, right? And it doesn't have a billion dollars behind it. If I at 1623 Farnham have a goal with my team to get an efficiency of 10% on free cooling, that's not gonna necessarily make the press, right? But I did reduce my impact by 10% and I increased my cash flow. So I think it's a really challenging question. And I think until we create some segments in the marketplace that we actually measure to, I think it's a real challenge as a whole sector. Dave, how do we measure things? I think Bill brought up some great points. We've been trying for years to come up with some sort of miles per gallon for the data center. And it just seems to be very elusive. I was a part of the Green Grip for many years when after they came up with BU and trying to refine BUE and it was initially designed as, this is how you compare yourself to yourself. Like when you ride your bicycle on a 10 mile ride, okay, I did it in this much time. Okay, I'm doing good. Not to compare yourself to the whole world. And I think that's kind of been lost, but that's certainly a big challenge. So the other thing that Bill brought up, I think that's very important is that, not all projects are gonna have a budget that begins with a billion dollar plus, right? So fully agree that what Jay said earlier about, small module reactors could be a great source of energy moving forward. It looks like some of those projects have started and stopped and but we didn't really have a lot of, it was gonna take a while anyway. So I don't think there was a real expectation that those would be done in as quick as this the way that industry moves. But what I do think we can do is first of all, I think we all gotta say, look, we're on this journey. What does this mean? If we could keep off one more diesel backup by using a battery energy storage or an extended run on your UPS or whatever, that's good. Does that solve everything? No, of course not. But it's a good step on the journey. If we can understand where our power is coming from, that's good and reduce the fossil fuels aspects of that. That's good, right? So I think being able to measure all those things and we have a lot of tools now that are able to do that. We've all seen the big press releases from the hyperscalers around 24 by seven renewable, admirable goal or green power, it's not just renewable. And I think that that's an admirable goal but that demands a lot of insight and a lot of analytics to be able to make that happen, of course. Part of that is gonna involve updating the grid. Updating the grid's gonna be an interesting question. And now also part of that's gonna be we're gonna be able to do things onsite, how are we gonna be able to do that? But I do think that that's definitely some things we can do. First and foremost, we gotta be able to measure and understand what we're consuming, where we're consuming it and if it's going to actual work. We've made tremendous, not to get too far into the data center world, but we've made tremendous strides in terms of our switch mode power supplies powering the IT equipment itself, where the old difference between full load and idle was about 5% or something of the Amp draw. So it wasn't really much or you could never really tell. That made that nice flat load curve that the utilities companies like. But now we're seeing more dynamic loads. Now we're actually able to turn stuff on and back off and that's making a much more variable load profile which leads to some challenges in terms of what we can do. So I think that smaller dispatchable power supplies whether onsite and renewable driven or at least green power driven are gonna play a big part in this moving forward. But the real point is we gotta be able to measure this stuff and that's what we can do now that we have these advanced tools available. So I think that that's gonna be more and more important moving forward. So to answer your question, how can we measure it? Well, we're starting to get the tools, we're starting to see them use more and more. I think we just gotta have a little bit of patience and also understand that not everybody's gonna have the budget of some of the hyperscalers in the billions with a B type to get these things done. But don't, you know, I'm an optimist. I think we're all optimists here. And I think that this is gonna be an interesting time. I've said that I've been in the industry for like 15, almost 20 years now. And I keep saying every year, why this year is really interesting, you know? Cause this year we're talking about, and last year I think we had kind of stabilized for a bit emerging from the pandemic and all of a sudden AI comes in and then you see the power curves on that and then, uh-oh, how are we gonna deal with this? So it's interesting cause we started to get a handle on sustainability but now we added variability into it. So how are we gonna deal with that? So good stuff. Jay, how do we measure things? Well, you know, it's interesting listening to both guys talk and, you know, I would first say that, you know, not all measurements are created equal. You know, when we went from buggy whips to Model T's, I don't think the Model T cared about miles per gallon, for example, it just worked. And we don't have to necessarily be worried about billion dollar projects. But I think one of the earlier discussion topics, Robert, was how do we make sure that we do it right? I think, you know, right has to be first center and third in priority, because you take a step back in something like this and then the naysayers start to come to the surface. But listening to Bill talk about, you know, he would have been doing cartwheels with a PUE of 1.03, I think that raises a really interesting point and that is, is that even a reasonable metric anymore? Meaning are we measuring the right thing? Is it just, you know, how much is air conditioning versus how much is compute or is there a total resources approach to how we start measuring? There's other elements, meaning the material science comes into play. You know, do you have fluids with fluorocarbons or are they all natural? The list could go on for some time. So I think if you took at the highest level though, and again, it's a repetitive, is when we start seeing sustainable business models come out of this will be the best metric because that means we've solved problems that matter. Customers would want to pay for it. And we're making it, and I think it was Bill who said, I've made a 10% improvement, it doesn't make the news. Well, I could care less about making the news. I'd rather make a good impact for my customers and my stakeholders. And forgo the billion dollar projects for right now and do some, you know, million dollar projects or multi-million dollar projects well, which, you know, all these things should be a little bit of a crawl, walk, run. There's a lot of technology on the material side. The, you know, we all know that the, the silicon side of this business is changing very, very quickly. I mean, we've got, you know, GPUs that are 800 Watts. They'll probably be 1200 Watts this time next year. Who knows? And they're going to want to put, you know, more and more of them into the server structure. So what does that mean in terms of how Bill deals with it in his data center, how we deal with it in terms of our putting solutions together, whether it's air-cooled or liquid-cooled. And then, you know, Dave, we need you to make some more power for us. So, yeah, we're all kind of on the hook here. But I do think that successful businesses by the definition of they're doing the right thing is what we should be looking for. All these things come with time. And that's why I say, when you look at the data center side of it, the total resource piece I think is going to be something we talk more and more about as we move into this because the makeup's going to change, right? If you stay, I don't need to have a 300,000 square foot building, but a 10,000 and build five, 10,000 square foot buildings. Well, you know what? Those go up faster. What's the hottest part of Bill's data center? It's the three-dimensional spot in the middle where it's the hardest to get air conditioning to and from, right? So if you can press that, your workload to move air changes. So when I say that there's a number of things that we can look at downstream, it's going to be, I think it's somewhat of an adaptation of what we have today, it's tomorrow. Again, PUE to resources. I love the miles per gallon thing Dave brought up because there is some of that as well. But I do think we can also look at how much space we're taking up. That's going to be a key thing. I just think out of the gate how much energy we can conserve because those are basic. We'll get a whole new suite of metrics. And again, we'll do this next time before the holidays and I'm sure we'll all be much wiser and better looking by then. But as a practical matter, I think the real answer is nobody really knows that answer except that we know that there are things inside of this work product that can create real benefits. And those are in preservation of energy, generating energy in a more clean, more intelligent way, looking at how we construct and the technologies that go behind that construction. And then again, back to business models. What kind of business models make this attractive to customers because in the end of the customers don't buy we're all sitting here talking to ourselves. We only have a couple of minutes left. There's one question, let's try to be brief on it. What surprising new twist do you think might emerge in 2024 and sustainability? From the inside, from the outside, anything out there that people are coming at the blind spot. Dave. I think that the adoption of AI and machine learning will lead to an ever increasing demand on power in 2024. And I think that'll be the twist. I think we thought it would take off, I think it's gonna take off even faster than we thought. So I think that we're gonna have to be in full mode to deploy everything as quick as possible. I think that's what's gonna happen from my perspective. And we're more rapid acceleration. Bill? Rob, I would say that it's really not a new twist because we're having a lot of those conversations today that is the explosion of AI and those workloads and where they need to sit. And when they need to sit geographically in our location, those workloads are things that we're not designed around. And so the new technologies, we have to be able to deploy new technologies to meet those demands. Okay. Well, as a 15 to 20 years recovering telecom guy, I'm gonna go with the Edge is gonna be the biggest wildcard in 24. We talk about AI, but AI is gonna migrate to the Edge. There are certain AI workloads that need to be close to consumers. We all know that the last mile is still not what the last mile needs to be. All three parties on this call have a hand to play in making that better, which is great because we, I think have a reasonably like-minded view of it. But it's those workloads that are gonna be to the Edge and one of my colleagues likes to say repeatedly that AI is the gold rush, we're selling the pickaxes. But as that gold rush moves out of the core and the urban areas into the Edge and even some rule environments, that's gonna create a real interesting opportunity. By the way, also to do things right the first time versus trying to retrofit what was done for 15, 20 years ago technology. So I see that as being one big swing that we will see more of as the 5G world evolves and the workloads and applications start to become more prevalent, whether it's Telefill on the blank or Industry 4. Whatever, or Pick Your Poison. But there are things yet to come that will get developed in 24. And that's always the thing I find most exciting about anything in Telecom is as soon as there's a new ideology out there, all of a sudden that free market gobbles up new ideas and makes it better than even the designers thought. So, but that edge to me is where the real excitement in 24 is gonna hit. We have one question from the audience before I turn it back to Barb, it's for Dave. Can you provide more commentary on ETRM? Do you have an example that illustrates how this is working in the market? Yeah, sure, real briefly, ETRM, Energy Trading and Resource Management. It was developed as in the past, when we deregulated electric utilities, they went to more transmission and distribution things and then they would buy generation from wherever. And this was a tool that allowed them to buy from whichever provider they wanted. Since then, in the last 10 years, it's become popular with larger multinationals and the largest heavy industries where they actually start doing that as well. So it's starting to become more prevalent. And yeah, I think that it's proven, which is always very important for our data centers. You don't wanna be the first guy to try anything out, that's for sure. You wanna be innovative, but not too innovative kind of thing, right? So it's been proven and it is working in the market, but again, primarily between the largest industries and power providers or between utility companies trading power from different suppliers. So that's what's going on right now. Alrighty, thank you very much to everybody. This has been a great discussion and Barbara, are you out there? There she is. I am, here I am, yeah, thanks everyone. What a great discussion. Thank you, Rob, and thank you all of our speakers, J. Bill Day, thank you so much for all of your insights on today's topic and to those that have been tuning in to today's round table. If you enjoyed this, please don't forget to keep your eyes open for volume two of Greener Data. Again, that's launching on Earth Day of 2024. In the meantime though, we have lots of resources for you. You can visit greenerdata.net for all of your sustainability related content and resources. So that's a wrap. You can look out for a playback of today's round table. It will be on JSA TV, JSA Podcasts, YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, so many places. There's no shortage of places where you can find this content. But in the meantime, don't forget that right after we wrap here, there's a networking lounge. So please stick around and you can chat with today's speakers and have a little bit of time to network. So enjoy everyone. Thank you again. Thank you to our viewers. Thank you to our panelists and Rob Powell. Thank you for your wonderful job moderating today's session. We'll see you back in the networking lounge. Until next time. Thank you. Thank you.