 I'm Buffy Hierarchetus, and on behalf of JSA, thank you for tuning in for a special Earth Day edition of JSO Virtual Round Tables, featuring today's topic, Renewable and Clean Energy Solutions to Cut Carbon in the Data Center. Today is also very exciting and notable here at JSA, as this morning we officially announced the second book installment of our Amazon best-selling greener data book series that will make its fabulous debut next year on Earth Day 2024. And in addition, we have also launched our official call for authors. So head on over to greenerdata.net for more info. And while you're there, be sure to check out chapter one with top industry thought leaders, including Susanna Kass with Infoprime, Dean Nelson with iMasons, Vicky Warden, CEO of Green Building Initiative, Sean Novak, CSL of N-Zero, and Patricia Stamos of Equinex. And a special thank you to Mary Allen of Insight as a Service. Well, now that I've made that incredible announcement on behalf of JSA, let's add some housekeeping before we begin. Our first 100 registrations today have now received lunch delivered to their door or a gift card, so please enjoy on behalf of the JSA family. And if you weren't one of our first, hopefully next time. We do want to hear from you and make this Round Table experience as interactive as possible. So please go ahead and add any questions you might have into the chat and our panelists will get to those if they have time. Or simply just stick around once our Round Table is over today and you can join our virtual networking tables immediately following for a unique opportunity to talk face to face with the speakers and other attendees. Just simply join a lounge table and the networking will begin. All right, so let's get this Earth Day Virtual Round Table show started. We're going to begin by going around the virtual round table for some introductions. We have Jeff Barber. He is the VP of Global Data Centers for Bloom Energy. Scott Hannah, the Chief Revenue Officer at Cumulus Data. Anad Ramish, SVP of Advanced Tech at Edge Connects. The San Nasir Data Center Advanced Development Team for Microsoft. And Sindhu Sharma, Head of Sustainability, Nextra at Airtel. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. And we'll circle back around and let you guys have the opportunity to introduce yourself a little bit further and tell us what you're doing in terms of renewable and clean energy. Jeff, we'll start with you. Great, thank you, Buffy. Appreciate it. As Buffy said, I'm Jeff Barber. I'm the VP of Global Data Center Sales for Bloom Energy based out of California. But today I'm sitting in beautiful Dublin, Ireland, a place where they they definitely have some power constraints much much worse than we see elsewhere. So what is Bloom Energy doing? Bloom Energy is green energy so as a company we definitely walk the walk and talk the talk. Most of us don't even carry business cards because we like to cut the paper. So Bloom provides much greener energy than most of the utilities on the planet through the use of solid oxide fuel cells. They are essentially hydrogen fuel cells today. However, we're able to extract the hydrogen from natural gas or biogas or a blend of any of those gases and use them to create electrons for on-site power generation. So the green energy initiatives in the data center are right up our alley. So yeah, I'm very excited to be here. Thanks again, Buffy. And thank you, Jeff. Scott. Hey everybody, Scott Hannah. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer for Cumulus Data, a wholly owned subsidiary of Talon Energy. We are building a data center campus directly connected to our nuclear power plant in northeast Pennsylvania where we'll have 475 megawatts of carbon-free power. The first building is constructed at 300,000 square feet. We intend it, you know, very attractive probably to hyperscale clients. But, you know, we're passionate about the ESG goals and the use of carbon-free power. So I think we're, you know, we're kind of a first mover. And this is directly connected to two reactors. So it's behind the grid. So it's not going out onto the, you know, the typical energy grid that most data centers pull from. So we, yeah, we're happy to be here and thanks for having us. And we are so happy to have you as well. And let's move on to Anath. Thanks for the intro, Buffy. So I'm Anath Ramesh, as Buffy mentioned, and I look at advanced technologies for EdgeConnect. So EdgeConnect is a hypothetical to hyperscale data center provider. So we've, we've sort of had a, I would say, long and fruitful journey with sustainability in general. So we've been doing things like sort of zero-enough or emissions using renewable energy credits as well as the sort of latest focus for us is 247 carbon-free energy. So we have a pilot that we wrote about at our Houston data center. And that's the direction that we're pretty excited about given many of our large customers are also sort of embracing that trend. So that's a little bit about me and the company. Thank you. San. Thank you, Buffy, for the introduction. My name is Esam Nasser. I am leading energy and energy storage activities in the research and development team under CTO Office at, at, at the Microsoft. And our team is focusing on advanced technologies, including energy, energy storage inside and outside of a data center. And we are particularly looking at advances and innovation technologies in energy space. And we're happy to hear. Thank you. And Sindhu. Thank you, Buffy, for the introduction. Hi, everyone. This is Sindhu Sharma, head in sustainability initiatives for Neshwara Airtel. Neshwara is the data center arm for Bahati Airtel Group. We have an India's largest network of data centers having more than 120 edge data centers, with 10 plus two data centers on few hyperstellars. We are in this journey of sustainability in part few years back. We have aggressive natural targeting as well as we are predominantly and focussely working on investment in energy projects for our hyperstellars. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. So happy to have you guys here today. And we also, you know, just had this recent international energy agency report stating that approximately 2.5 percent of global energy is consumed by data centers and data networks. And this number is expected to quickly rise, which does bring us here together today to talk about this critical topic on Earth Day, we'll close to Earth Day. And with global energy used by data centers alone to increase 8 to 10 percent by 2030, this conversation is more critical than ever. So let's start with a little bit about the many facets of energy maturity within the data center. And what factors do we need to consider to get to a clear pathway to energy maturity? Why don't we start with you, Jeff? I think you're on mute. Yes, first question. I'm not following directions already. Yes, very, very typical. What can we do to define a pathway to energy maturity? Personally, I do think we're in the infancy stages, like we spoke about earlier, infancy stages of understanding this question. I think first and foremost though, if I think about word maturity, it typically means that we're willing to admit we have a problem and we're willing to admit that we can't go, you know, from zero to 100 miles an hour instantly. If the goal is stated as being too large, it tends to be dilutive to the activity, to the actions. So I think first and foremost we have to realize that we should take a pragmatic approach, take very real steps that are, again, realistic for today's market. So for instance, you know, at Bloom, we would love it if there was a robust green hydrogen network for us to use as we could use that today, but it's not there. So we, you know, we work with natural gas as an example. It's much cleaner than other forms of energy generation, but is it absolutely zero? No, but it's 30% better. So I think maturity is taking a pragmatic approach and truly understanding that the underpinnings need to be there before we can solve the problem or get to truly zero. Thank you for that. You weigh in on that, Scott, as well. Yeah, I agree with Jeff. We're in kind of the infancy stage. I mean, we're seeing now, and to your point, Buffy, you know, the 2.5% today, but growing to 8 to 10% for data centers, that's a lot of power. And if you think about right now, you know, we used to, we used to look at data centers on where the connectivity was, and that's still important, but now they're looking to where the power is. And so it's becoming a huge issue for, and it's perfect for Earth Day. It's coming, a huge issue for us. And I think, you know, their data centers are looking to find big, huge swaths of power. And we need to have, you know, you gotta think about a couple of things. Number thing, the use of power, right? How are we using it? How efficient are we? You know, can we use it differently? And that's important. We need to get power companies on board with, you know, this whole data center concept. And I also think we need to utilize the nuclear power plants that we have in the United States today. There's 99 of them. And we're not using them. They're providing power to the grid. But, you know, at carbon-free power, and it's a base load power, there could be a lot done in that realm as well. But I mean, think about long-term, right now we're thinking about where can I get power. Long-term, we have to have a well-thought-out strategy of using renewables, using nuclear, using what Jeff's doing, what Jeff's doing, everyone on this call is doing to achieve that. And again, I think we're at the end of the stage right now. It's definitely a mix of, you know, energy and a combination. And we chatted a little bit about that before we jumped on the call. I'd love to hear from Edge Hinex and Anad. Sorry. So, yeah, I think all valid points made. In our minds as providers of capacity to, you know, some of the biggest names in the industry, I would say that number one, access to power and number two, reliability of said power and number three, quantity of power is probably first and foremost. So, customer needs are customer needs and that is likely to evolve with time to kind of align with better supply. So, once you take these constraints, then you have to figure out a path towards decarbonization. So, as Jeff mentioned, you can't go from 0 to 100 in one step and I think that's sort of really important to call out. So, renewable energy credits, for example, are an imperfect but still an effective tool for managing emissions. But ultimately, the pathway has to be towards negating carbon emissions on, shall we say, an hourly or 15 minute interval level while driving additionality on the grid. So, I think we are very, very aware of the constraints that we have to operate under and, you know, how do you sort of solve this problem given these constraints is basically what we spend a lot of time thinking about. Thank you. Over at Microsoft, Asant? Yeah, thank you. I think I personally agree with our friends here and back into the idea of from what we are right now and the end goal is kind of a pathway that we have to set with the collaboration with the partners. And especially data center industry can be the lead in that journey through connecting to the different partners, including the utilities, energy providers and like the whole ecosystem. And at the end of the day, that is not a particular solution or not particular like a technology that can solve the overall journey. And that is going to be a portfolio and each technology can solve one piece of the whole puzzle. And that's why we need to have a group of the collaboration between the whole industry to see what part of the puzzle can be solved by the certain technologies and how we can get to the goal of the net zero or having including the ecosystem solution for energy maturity. Definitely, collaboration holds the key. Sindhu, I mean, at Nextra by Airtel, I mean, collaboration is right here, right? We have Bloom, Nextra, we're collaborating their partners. Why don't you give us a little insight there? Sure. So, like Jeffrey and you don't explain you formulate in a right decarbonization plan for overall journey is the trust. And you need to interpret all technologies, not just, you know, whatever you have right now, you know, to think of two years, three years down the line, like we have collaborated and introduced Bloom into our system, we need to think of hydrogen, we need to also work on the new technologies and not just supply side intervention, we need to also work on the demand side where we need to work aggressively to cut down your PUE and to reduce down your PUE. So it's a perfect blend of energy mix, along with, you know, right interventions, both side demand side and supply side will give you the maturity which we are looking for in the next few years. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for these insights. And moving on, you know, the goal, obviously, is to achieve these environmental targets quickly. What is the path of least resistance? And what are some of the steps in the process that are most challenging? What are some of these obstacles? You know, we talk about this question, we're thinking in terms of what are some of the quickest ways data centers can get wins when it comes to hitting these targets? Jeff? That's an easy one. What are the quickest ways? Well, when I speak to the developers, data center owners and operators, they're not always aware of what technologies are available. So I think the first step is understand what options are out there. I also think that we need to start giving feedback to the occupants of these data centers. So, you know, much of the market are developers and tenants versus managed service providers. They're not all AWS or Google. So I think giving feedback, kind of like biofeedback, giving feedback to the tenants that, you know, deploying 50% more power than you're most likely ever going to use is going to cost X. Or here's the carbon footprint of that least term as an example. Maybe providing options. I understand that to provide those options, there could be some heavy lifting. It's, you know, the data center industry is not exactly the fastest moving from, hey, innovation perspective. One of our original folks and board members, Peter Gross, once said the data center industry loves innovation as long as it's 10 years old. Okay, so we first need to look at that. And we need to understand that there are steps that we can take today. There are products such as ours and others that are somewhat future proof, in other words, ready for things such as hydrogen that can help mitigate the coming onslaught, in my opinion, of high performance compute, GPU workloads, AIML. We know that this is beginning now, the 2.6%, I think you said that's consumed today. I think that could almost be an exponential curve once enterprises and data centers begin to deploy high performance GPUs and working on this within the enterprise. Many times we forget that about 70, 75% of enterprise data is still on a dedicated floor at the enterprise. It's not just in the cloud as an example. So yeah, I think understanding the market, articulating to the tenants, to the customers, what their impact is, I think could help a lot in the short term. For sure. Scott, you want to add to that? Yeah, I agree with Jeff that a definite need is to have that communication and be willing to do new things, maybe run things hotter, run things less redundant, those types of things. I mentioned before, I don't want to be a brokering record here, but I think nuclear power needs to be brought into the fray a little bit more. There's a lot of technologies out there, but obviously nuclear is 100% carbon free, and it's a base load power, so I think that needs to be leveraged in a bigger way. We need to continue to develop wind and solar, which I know we're doing. I know our company, we're developing 2.4 gigawatts of it on land that we have, so that needs, and then storage technologies in order to be able to increase the storage capacities of wind, so you can actually use that power for data centers. Those are some things, and I know we'll probably get into the more challenging things on the next question, but those are some easy things. And then lastly, there's probably a little bit more challenging than we think, but it's working with the power companies, the utilities to partner with data centers, because they use so much power. So it's probably a little more difficult given the complexities of utility companies and data center companies, but that's something we need to start doing as well. Yes, and how about over at EdgeConnect and not hear from you guys? Yeah, I'll sort of split my answer into two components, so there's supply side and there's demand side, like what can we do on the supply side and what can we do on the demand side, and I'll start with the demand side first. Clearly using less power is kind of an obvious one, so efficiency is super important, things like PV, etc, are very good in material in this journey that we're on. So the less of power we as an industry use the simpler the path to eventually colonization. I think the second one is around relieving congestion and constraints around lots of grids around the world. I think pretty much everyone in the audience is very familiar with some of the issues that we're seeing in the major markets. And a lot of this has to do with reserve capacity versus what is actually used. So that's another product of conversation we can have with utilities before things start getting mandated on the industry itself. So those are on the demand side, on the supply side, I think going back to what I said earlier, the first and easiest step to take is to sort of go the PPA out, and that signals a traditionality interest, in the sense that if you're signing a PPA for XMAP awards and that sends a signal to a developer to actually add capacity and the grid and so on, that's going to get us to a certain point and obviously the last X percent, whatever that is depending on the part of the world that you're in is going to be hard. But I'm sure we're going to talk about that in a little bit. Thank you. Isal? Yeah, sure. I believe the topic was covered well on this question, but I believe one of the key aspects back to the analog points is basically from a demand side, for sure, focusing on efficiency is super important. Also, there is another key important on a flexible IT load and what we can do in above efficiency, what we can get it done to the IT load to be a flexible and also to be a kind of a dynamic to what's happening on the other side of the fence of a data center. And that kind of an idea needs to have an innovation from a data center operator and owner and the hyper-scaler to see what it can get it done on a demand side. For the sourcing part, I think the easiest path that most of the company that is like as a first step that they can go and just take is just buying the clean energy through the PPA. But one step further is how they can match that renewable energy with the load. Basically, one of the commitments that we are starting to look at is basically to source all the load, all the electron that we're going to use by the clean energy all the time. So once we're talking about all the time, we add additional complexity here because that is not something that easily given just by energy because the demand and source should be matched all the time. That is how the grid is going to work. And if you wanted to participate to help the whole ecosystem, this step is going to add additional complexity to the whole solution. And one of the report that I found is that if we are like matching the load from 0 to the 70, to the 70, 80 percent, it can be done only through the PPA of the renewable energy procurement. But after that, we need to have some sort of energy storage and some sort of additional technology or the base power like that we need from the nuclear power in order to match that load and generation, which again is kind of a portfolio of different type of technologies in this case. So I believe all the panelist has covered rightly, but I just wanted to add in the supply side, the need of an R is to have right collaborations and partnerships. And that too long term. If you see the data center business, we have a gradual path or gradual load increase if we'll go and commission a new data center. So right sort of collaboration will help you to get renewable energy from day one. So that sort of partnership is required. Second, under demand side, there are good companies working on the pooling technologies. So a genuine force is required from the customers to the developers like us for adopting the right pooling technologies. We have good technologies available in the last many years. But if we'll keep on working on the conventional way of pooling the data centers, then we shall not be able to reach PUE, which we are targeting. So these are the two major things I believe is required if you really want to achieve what we are targeting from here. And anyways, target is to get, you know, grab the low hand in food, which is sign in virtual PPA options as well as go on term within the units. Thank you. So if we talk a little bit about success, what does that look like, Jeff? I'm going to go on record as stating I don't like this alphabetical listing, taking every question first. Either that or I'm going to change my name, is what I'm thinking. No, no, it's a great question. Obviously, it's a very subjective question as well. Personally, if we're talking about a march towards, you know, much greener usage or zero carbon usage, I think success must be measured incrementally. You can't, you know, to use a sports analogy, you know, you can't, you can't expect, you know, a child to go plan a professional football or baseball team on day one. We need to first come up with metrics that are relevant for where we are. So that means that we admit where we are and we document metrics because if you don't measure something, it's very difficult or impossible to manage it and to make incremental progress. So success to me means that we are constantly moving up and to the right as far as reducing carbon, not going from, you know, one giant leap because that breaks the system many times. Many times break the economy and the economics and when the economics don't work out, it just doesn't work. So yeah, success to me is developing a set of reasonable metrics that takes into account reasonable resources that are behind us today. In other words, if the infrastructure is just not there, infrastructure that took generations to build in many cases, if we're talking about the grid, if the alternative is simply not there, you can't expect to achieve zero carbon on day one. We need to begin marching towards it, however, taking your incremental steps. Yes, we'll switch it up. The order a little bit. So like Jeff, Jeff said, you know, everyone is in the race to reach net zero as soon as possible. But if we will do that and compromising the business needs, that is not really the success. So we need to think of, you know, the right sort of interventions and and if you are achieving the targets which you are adopting on time with without compromising the needs of the business as well as without compromising the collaborations, partnership and, you know, on a separate route for the new technologies, then I believe that will be the success if you will achieve it and you will bring all these things on a table at the right time. Thank you. Scott? Yeah, I do agree there. I think everything we're doing is really, really good. But you do, we do have to measure it. And if we can get one percent better every Idaho coach tell me get one percent better every day, you know, before you know it, you're going to get really, really good. And if we can do that, I think we do need to be careful, as Sindhu has said, not to compromise. We can't put unrealistic goals out there. You know, a lot of folks are stating these goals and some of them I believe are unrealistic. But we can't go backwards either. Like, you know, Germany just shut down their last three nuclear plants. And guess what they're going to use now? Coal. So that's going to me, it's going backwards. So I, you know, we got to continue to promote these clean energy solutions and continue to get better. And I think if we just focus on getting, you know, like one percent better every day, then we'll have success. Definitely. Nad? Yeah, I mean, the measurement part is, is sort of pretty self-evident, right? But I would sort of again, urge folks to think along three lines, based on scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions. We spend most of our time talking about scope two emissions today. This is essentially power that the data center is used. But obviously, there's a lot of carbon concrete as well as steel manufacture. So as an industry, I think it's pretty critically important to send out signals to industry in terms of, you know, what we plan to do as far as scope one emissions, that drives activity in the marketplace, which hopefully sort of has this nice final effect of bringing more innovation to the table. That's one. The second is that, I mean, like the talk of incrementalism, I think is fair. But I also want to sort of point out that we are at 412 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere today. Like that's the latest measurement. In the start of the industrial age, we were at 280. So yes, doing things better is obviously beneficial. But we do actually have to have a plan for fixing the quote unquote damage that's already been done. That could be through investments in technology or just an acknowledgement that yes, like we plan to get to net zero at some point of time in the future. But we actually need to zero out emissions starting a certain day. And there has to be a plan for that. And that again, sends signals into the marketplace in terms of what is important. Because freezing CO2 levels that we are today is actually not enough. We have to bend that curve downward as well. So I think it's important to kind of acknowledge all of these and essentially have targets or metrics that help us get there. So it seems like we had some reactions there to some of your comments. So feel free to love like in your little emoji area there. And feel free to send some questions over into the chat. The panelists will be more than happy to answer. Asad? Yeah, sure. I do agree. This success, I believe that's a journey. That's a journey that we stop like the whole industry started from a couple of years back and they acknowledge that is a challenge that we need to tackle as a whole industry. And I agree, that's the kind of incremental success through the milestone that we have. Because there is no endpoint that they said, okay, once we got that certain day, we're going to solve all the issues. No, that's not how it's going to work. But the fact is that with the increase of the energy consumption and the expansion of the AI, ML and the cloud industry, once we had the like the smallest scale at this industry, especially in a data center. And once we are looking at in the next five to 10 years, we do see there is a huge there would be a huge effort we need to make in order to to still the same the same status that we are doing today. So we need to have a significant work to make sure that we can tackle the challenges that we have. Back to the end point that's scope one and two and three. The scope one, I believe some people they were saying that's easy, but the thing is that that is that is that is something that we need to tackle at least from a first first part of the data center, especially the diesel generator, how we can use the alternative, for example, using the hydrogen, using energy storage, that kind of thing. And I at the end, I believe that the success is a whole journey and like getting and achieving the the milestone at each step is a success for the whole industry. And while we have you, we'll dive into our last questions. We're about to wrap up here. We have a few minutes left. But looking into your crystal ball, what do you see happening in the next three to four years? Let's say some predictions to create smarter, more flexible energy systems moving from that zero mission. Yeah, I believe that is from from from innovation side. I think that's the key important factor that in the next few years, we need to invest and we need to find the to invest on a technology that can change or change from the from the technical perspective and also from the business perspective. And also, the additional like the factor that is going to be a happen with the increased amount of the IoT smart devices that we have, and also more flexible and a smart controller that we're going to have, we're going to have the system more smarter and also the especially the collaboration with the grid, which is more grid friendly and working as the ecosystem, which the data center is not going to the burden to the utility and to the energy industry that is going to a part of the whole solution. And I believe in the next few years, we do see the data center industry, they're going to have more contribution to the overall energy industry, rather than only the burden to the industry. And we hope that we're going to be a lead in that sector. Thank you. We have time for probably one more crystal ball prediction here. How about we turn that over to edge connects Sure, I think the demand, the demand side flexibility is something that both Sindhu and Assam brought up. And I think that's going to be that's going to be really important, right? So we've always treated IT load as the invariant. And I think we're reaching the situation where we're acknowledging that it's not right. There's, there's work that, you know, Microsoft has published Google has published work about, you know, moving load according to carbon intensity, etc. So I think approaches like these are going to become more commonplace. So that's one. And I think the second point, in general, I would like to make is that I think as an industry, we've gotten pretty used to showing up and saying, we must have XMAC awards and, you know, we kind of get get that and people to data center and so on and so forth. I think it's going to the conversation is going to start getting flipped like how do we fit into communities? How do we fit into electricity grids? And I think as an industry, we kind of have to do apart some things like demonstrating efficiency, bringing additional renewable capacity to the table, etc. etc. So thank you. And thank you gentlemen so much for all of your insight that you have delivered today here on JSA's virtual roundtable, special Earth Day edition. And thank you to all our viewers live on LinkedIn and across the world that have tuned in today to join us for this very special Earth Day edition of JSA's virtual roundtable. This is such a timely topic as we discussed and, you know, as we approach Earth Day in just a few days, it's very critical that we do come together like you gentlemen have discussed throughout this conversation and partner and collaborate to achieve the ultimate goal of reducing carbon emissions. So thanks again and viewers. We hope you enjoyed your lunch. If you're one of the first 100 registrations and make sure you visit us at greenerdata.net to hear our big news today, the launch of the greener data second edition Amazon bestselling book and our official call for authors. And we hope to see you next time. Our next discussion takes place on May 25th at 1pm, where we'll discuss connecting the unconnected with digital infrastructure solutions. And that's a wrap. Be sure to look out for the playback of today's roundtable coming soon to JSA TV and JSA podcast. We're on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, and so much more. In the meantime, we'll see you back in the networking lounge and happy networking and happy Earth Day from all of us at JSA.