 Welcome to JSATV Europe together with the greener data movement for this quarter's live event focused on the European Digital Infrastructure Sustainability. I'm Romax Lehman, joining me today is John Booth, Chair of Energy Efficiencies Group at Data Center Alliance, and John, it's a pleasure speaking to you. We were just chatting and saying how long it's been since we last saw one another. Indeed, and I'm missing the budget for you, Jal, so can we hurry this along please? I mean, well, let's get on with it then. We're here to talk about data sustainability, but I think sometimes a key question that gets left out is what is data sustainability? What does this whole thing mean? Well, sustainability is basically meeting the needs of the present without impacting on the needs of future generations. And in the data center context and the wider ICT context, that's actually quite a problematic statement because we are extracting around 50 rare earth minerals on the periodic table and we're processing them. We're making composites out of them and we're putting them into IT equipment, which are then used for three or four years, maybe up to five, seven years in the case of service, which is 15. And then once we've finished with them, it appears that we are putting them into containers and shipping them off to third world countries for processing. And this is obviously not sustainable in any way, shape or form. So there needs to be some more work done, I think, by the ICT companies in terms of recovering and recycling those components. And of course, what that would ultimately mean is they will have to start to redesign the components because they'll need to be able to extract them. And using composites and layers is quite problematic to actually extract those rare earths. At the same time, we're using transport energy and in-use energy to power all these components throughout literally the whole life cycle. Yeah, and I think what you say about the whole life cycle, I think that's where the discussion has been moving slowly towards now in a positive sign that things are actually shifting in a good direction. Because people do forget this is a circular economy. People do forget that this is a loop and we need to fix it, not just one end. Yeah, and there has been some great work being done by some of the European Commission working groups. There's loads of projects on the circular economy. There's Siddachi, I believe my colleague Wee Loop as well. So this is all there, but this is really just proof of concept and some small kind of not at scale delivery mechanisms. We're doing quite a lot in the UK actually. I was talking to Andy Gomersall from NS2 last week and he was telling me that they're building a plant in Cambridge to recover components from old ICT kit. And the more deliveries and shipments of old stuff he gets, the better and happier he'll be because he'll be able to produce some really good, you know, re-manufactured more materials for future use. Okay, and then I read one of your recent blogs and I think it was in Tech UK, published on Tech UK website. And it was around the need to, and you've already touched on it, it's around the need of passing on a little bit of this to the user and how we deliver ICT to the user and changing a little bit things around. Are you of the opinion that we need to fundamentally rethink how ICT is delivered to the end user? Absolutely, yeah, I think we're, you know, we're still using circuits and componentry today that was basically developed in the latter half of the 20th century. And we're kind of building on old technology. And I think that with the knowledge that we've gained now, we can start to use new materials and actually start to design for circularity and recovery. But we're not there yet, by a long way. Okay, so if we're looking to the data center space, for example, what do you think would be the main three priorities that operators and people should be focusing right now to at least make some stronger push in the short term? You know, I've been talking about this for a long time now and, you know, we're still designing data sensors to the designs of the 1960s. I visit quite a few data sensors. As you know, I do assessments. I've been to data sensors all around the world. And I've got actually got an old data center quite close to our lives, which is in the midlands of the UK and that was built in 1977. Wow. And we went out there about three or four years ago on behalf of the landlord because the existing incumbent was planning or they had a break clause in their lease. And they wanted to see how much it was valued or what they needed to do with it. And then a couple of weeks later, I visited a fairly brand new data center down in Farnborough. And to be honest, there wasn't that much difference between the layout and the concept and the design and the equipment within. And that's, you know, 40, nearly 50 years difference between them and no real fundamental change. And then I started looking into it from an automotive perspective. And so I thought I'd look at the 1977 fiesta. That was the first year that it was actually on sale in the UK. And then I looked at the 1921 fiesta and they are two completely different beasts, you know, that the new fiesta has got a smaller engine which is more powerful. It's got better interior, it's got better aerodynamics and shaping. It's got better in car entertainment. It's a connected vehicle. It can connect to the internet and all this sort of thing. But the difference was really stark. And if you compare that to the two designs of the two data centers, there had been no innovation, literally no innovation. And I think we need to start to think about how we build and operate data centers moving forward. And luckily for us, you know, there are some things coming down the pipeline which should have a fundamental impact on how they do that. So, well, the question that was coming to my mind is like, if you had to describe the data center of the future or the ideal data center where this whole innovation has happened, how would you envision that place to be? I was going to say 2050, but there's probably too far down the line. We need to do it beforehand. Well, yeah, I often say that as well. You know, in order to meet our 2030 goals, we've only got seven years left. And if we want to meet our 2050 goals, we've got 27 years left. Yeah. So fundamentally, I think we're going to have to start thinking about the shell and core. So, you know, this is from a building point of view, an actual construction point of view. So less steel, or if we are going to be using steel, then make sure it's relatively carbon free steel. So there's a new steel plant that's just opened in Sweden, which is using hydrogen. And that brings down the actual emissions of, you know, a cube meter of steel considerably. The same with concrete. We need to be thinking about using different binders and fillers and eco concretes for the base. And then we look at the actual internal panels and everything, you know, there are other construction materials that are more recyclable, more nature in effect. That can be used, which do have some quite interesting properties, dam prevention and fire retardant in these materials. And then of course we've got to look at the mechanical electrical engineering. You know, I think if you were to take a kilowatt of energy that comes out of a power station, by the time it gets to the actual working part of the server, which is the chip. It's lost something like 99.5% of the energy. So only 0.5% actually gets to the chip. That's a terrible number to say to somebody. If you said that, oh yeah, we're wasting 99.5% on energy, quite rightly people would be up in arms. It's like running a Jaguar on the front lawn with the key and the ignition and the engine on, just in case you need to go down to the shop. You know, it's just madness. Yeah, it's what happens as well in the energy space. We always talk about energy production is easy. It's the transport of it as well. That's where a lot of energy is wasted. Absolutely. So, you know, in that power chain, we are we're transforming from the DC that's created in the power station itself. We are pumping up to high tension lines with boosting it. We're taking it down via step down transformers. And then we have a transformer right at the, you know, at the entrance of the data center and then we put it through all of our power backup and generators. And then it goes through more and more transformers until it gets to the rack itself and then the power cable is plugged into back at the server. And oh, look, there's another transformer there that's taking it down from 240 volts AC in the UK down to minus plus 12 volts DC. So, you know, there's humongous amount of waste. And I think that data centers not need to start thinking about direct current. And I think that they should be able to look at using solar panels and other renewable energy sources on sites. So we can be taken off the grid. Okay. I mean, the natural follow up question does come down to regulations and you were actually a reviewer for the European Union code of conduct for data centers around energy efficiency. You're probably one of the most knowledgeable people on the continent around data center energy usage for the good, the bad and the ugly. I mean, tell us about it's not so much about the role of regulations, but maybe your take on the up and coming regulations and how is that going to impact the market. Yes. So there's three pieces of legislation coming down the line. Two of them already enforced. So we've got the what is known as the EU taxonomy. And in the compass for the taxonomy specifically references the code of EU code of conduct or its standardized equivalent which is 99 dash one. And of course, it also required that the refrigerant gases using data center cooling should have a global warming potential of less than 675. And no means prevalent only one or two gases are actually below that. But the installed estate across Europe is kind of using the other refrigerant gases so they will need to be a bit of a rethink about how they go about that. There's also a requirement for an independent audit of that data center every three years and this was the subject of considerable amount of angst last last year. And two meetings that were held in May where the community and some of the auditing firms were discussing how they could audit to the taxonomy requirements because the code of conduct as written is very much you shall consider and evaluate. They're very, very soft terms of thinking. And of course, you can't you can't audit a consider. It's impossible, you know, you've either given you the choice. Yeah, we would consider in something you look at the options and but you also have the choice of doing nothing because you're just considering. So, as a result of that conversation and the discussions we had DG connect from the commission commission the tick council which is the global body for certifying bodies. They, they look after the likes of bureau veritas BSI SGS and all those kind of companies that do ISO audits to create an auditable version of the code of conduct. So, we spend probably through September through to December, looking at the code of conduct expecting best practice of which are 106. And we basically rewritten them into a standards format so instead of consider it's like the organization shall consider. So, that means there's an auditable paper trail for so that when the independent auditor comes in he can actually see that it has been done, and it's not just a verbal discussion that they had down the pub one night. That taxonomy framework is scheduled to be published this week. Very timely. Although there may be some delay because I was looking at the to read draft published on Monday and noticed an error, which we're taking some more advice on, but it's due to be published very soon. And what that will do, it will make data sensors have to do this independent audit every three years, and then publish the results on their website and and then, you know, it by a beware caveat enter. If somebody wants to locate their stuff in that particular data center or use a cloud service from one of the hyperscale is then they'll have all the information to hand that links back to the corporate sustainability reporting directive. So that then falls on everybody else. So they have to report their scope one scope two and scope threes and they should be asking data centers what proportion of the data center scope one and scope two and scope three is applicable to their particular instance. And that's why I think that could be that's going to be problematic, because most of the data centers operators are only calculating scope one and scope two. And then how do you apportion the scope one and scope two across a colo site for instance where you may have multiple customers easier to do in a single cloud instance or an enterprise data center because all of the it belongs to you. But you know if you're using a caged environment or a color environment, how do you how do you account for the proportion of the data center overhead for a particular customer. And then last but not least is the recast of the energy efficiency directive. And we've been having discussions on that over the last couple of weeks as well. And that basically requires independent reporting by the data centers to as yet unnamed commission function or national government function for at least four elements which is the total energy consumption. And the balance of that which is derived from renewables, water usage and energy waste heat reuse as well. That one is still very much in the balance there is a lot of dialogue going on between. You know I like the commission because it basically reaches out to all of its stakeholders and says right you know, this is what we're proposing what do you think. And then they go back to the drawing board and recast it and they throw it out again. And we can at least keep going on until everybody's happy or happy ish. Yeah, sometimes the back and forward this take a little bit too long. Do you guys have a time set for when it needs to be done. It needs to be published by the requirement from the EP for the EED is that it's in place so that companies are reporting in 2025 their 2024 data. So they would they have to be done by the end of the year. Okay, coming coming months we're going to hear more about it. I was going to say then just because I'm just conscious of time as well this is very interesting especially the regulation side everyone is interested in regulations this year. But so just talking now about you a little bit what you want to apart from all you just said of course I mean there's data centre alliance there's carbon IT. There's a few other things that are involved with give us a spiel of what you're going to be working on for the rest of the year beyond these regulations that you've just mentioned. Okay, so carbon three IT limited which is my main company we've got a couple of assignments at the moment so we're working with the largest data centre construction project in Europe at the moment. And we provide in real time carbon footprint in and that's an ongoing assignment so we're we're assisting them with all things sustainability as it were, we're also doing that for a 5G wireless broadband provider in the north of England. And we continue our work with Swedish clients and Nordic clients, basically on regulations and steering them and helping them to understand what's happening from a data centre alliance perspective. We are obviously the energy efficiency specialist group is right on the case with all of the regulations. And we're looking at interesting kind of collaborations around the dissemination of that to the user community both in the operators and the supply chain. And we also have another business which is the National Data Centre Academy. That's a training business. And what we've noticed from the training that's available pre and post pandemic is that a lot of the training is what I like to call death by PowerPoint in a classroom. And you never get the chance to actually look at around a data centre usually in hotels, which makes it difficult when the instructor introduces a concept and you can't really feel it or touch it. I mean, at the end of the day, most of the people that work in data centres, technical staff are engineers, so they learn better from doing feeling touching. I mean, I always say you wouldn't get you wouldn't trust a mechanic to service your car if he'd been trained over YouTube, but we seem to want to do that with data centres. And during the pandemic it was death by PowerPoint over zoom, you know, which again is quite interesting. So the concept of the Academy is, and we're hopefully hearing out some more information this week, as we have actually found an old workplace recovery site, which would obviously have been used for disaster recovery and business continuity in the past, but obviously because of pandemic we realised actually what you need to do is give somebody a laptop and make sure that the high speed connection. So this particular building has a tier three data centre in the basement and it's got a load of training rooms or would have been offices on the mezzanine floor. So our hope is to use the tier three training as an actual physical training facility so people can come in and understand the hot and cold car concept. They can look at the inner guts of an air conditioning crack unit. They can look at chillers. They can look at the powertrain they can they can actually do mains failure without fear of impacting on anybody's operation. We're going to have most of the IT kit within it will be a mixture of heat load and recovered refurbished IT equipment running emulated software. So it's all intents and purposes. It will have the feel, the taste, the smell and the noise of a data centre. And we're also going to look at new concepts like we'll probably have a lot of immersed compute solutions there for training purposes. And also we'll be looking at fuel cells for primary and backup power. And we'll also be looking at having some battery energy storage and we'll probably put some solar arrays on the roof. So we really want to test all of the up and coming concepts that we think we're going to be using for data centres. And there's an opportunity for people to demonstrate their products there. So one of the other things is it's going to be a kind of semi permanent showcase. So, you know, we were at data centre world last week. I don't know if you were there. Yeah. You know, it was a great event. There was lots of things going on. And I got changed to a few of the stand holders and I was saying, you know, how much you paid paying to be here. And even the smallest company was the thick end of 20 grand. So for 20 grand, they can have for two days in the academy. They can have 240 days and it's a place where they can store their equipment. They're going to be visible to all of the delegates coming through because obviously not all of the target markets have the time to visit the big trade shows. So we're missing out on our significant proportion of people that are owning and operating server groups really. So that gives them a better visibility of the products that are out there because, you know, we have to continue. Last but not least, we're also working on a, they've just changed the name and it was a Bay so department of business energy innovation and skills. And now it's the energy security and net zero department on something called the ticker project, which is the transformation industrial cooling and refrigeration. And what we're doing there is we're undertaking surveys of data centre cooling systems, which is actually proven to be really interesting. So the five surveys we've done to date, we've identified significant potential energy savings up to 25%. And in some cases more, just by doing some minor tweaks to the condensing and evaporating temperatures and also some installation practices that were prevalent in the past that are really no longer prevalent now. And if that, if the rest of the project goes well, that should have a significant benefit to UK PLC. Okay. And then John, I mean, everything you say just ask to the interesting list because you've got your finger in so many different pies and important pies as well. This is not just any random pie. You still got 10 of them. But I was going to say, if you want to reach out to you very quickly, if you want to reach out to you, what's the best way to getting touch? Well, we're on LinkedIn. All of our contact details information there. We have our own website, www.carbonfreeit.com, Twitter at carbon free it limited. We normally attend most of the trade events. So I will be in one a code this year. I've actually been invited to speak on data centre legislation and sustainability data centre world in Austin in Texas. Oh, well. And I'm really looking forward to that one because I've been to Austin a few times and it's a great city for live music. And all of those data centre guys down there will be will be an interesting week. Yeah. You can't go wrong in Austin because it's really nice. The streets there with the bars and everything. It's quite a lively city. It is very lively city. John, as always, it's a great pleasure speaking to you. We must catch up at some point in the coming weeks in person. But thank you for coming on board for JSA TV. And as we are home, thank you for watching. And don't forget to check our social channels for more content. Until next time, happy networking. Thank you. Thank you.