'Very Concerning': Data Centers Still Far Behind On Tracking Emissions

Most data center operators still aren’t tracking carbon emissions and other key environmental data, a new report found, raising questions about the credibility of their sustainability claims.

The data center industry has made little progress measuring sustainability metrics like carbon emissions, water usage and renewable energy consumption, according to a report published Wednesday by industry think tank Uptime Institute.

The report’s authors said that despite years of loud warnings, data center firms are still largely unprepared to comply with looming sustainability reporting requirements mandated by the European Union and other governments. 

“The industry is simply not ready for what is being asked of it in terms of sustainability reporting,” Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, said on a Wednesday webinar about the report. “For all that we’ve been talking about it in the industry … this message hasn’t properly hit home or been fully engaged with.”

Continuing the data center industry’s “patchy” track record of collecting sustainability-related data, Uptime’s report suggests that the majority of firms are only monitoring sustainability metrics with a direct impact on their bottom line.

A majority of operators are only reporting two sustainability metrics, their overall power consumption and power usage effectiveness, which measures a facility’s energy efficiency. In a sector where energy is generally the largest operating cost, these are metrics that would likely be tracked as performance indicators regardless of the sustainability implications. 

“There are obvious reasons why these two are the most reported: the data is collected easily and is of most interest to executives,” the report says. “The energy used or wanted has a direct impact on operational costs and improving efficiency has a direct impact on business performance and environmental impact.” 

Beyond these two metrics, fewer than half of the data center operators surveyed by Uptime reported collecting any of several key sustainability measures.

Even though data centers are projected to account for as much as 8% of total U.S. energy use within a decade, only 27% of operators are tracking the emissions produced in generating that electricity, a metric known as Scope 2 emissions. Despite the low number, the report says Scope 2 emissions were the only sustainability measure that saw a meaningful increase in reporting, up from 19% last year. 

Just 36% of respondents said they track Scope 1 emissions they produce at their facilities through diesel generators and other systems. Supply chain emissions, known as Scope 3, were reported by just 18% of respondents. Fewer than half of the firms surveyed are tracking their consumption of water or renewable energy. 

This widespread failure to track sustainability data should be raising alarm bells with the data center operators themselves, who face fast-approaching deadlines to report much of this data by a growing number of governments around the world, the report’s authors said. 

The European Union’s Energy Efficiency Directive will require operators to report their renewable energy consumption and potable and nonpotable water usage either by the end of this year or by 2025, yet just over 40% of respondents to Uptime’s survey track that data.

Similarly, carbon emissions data is going to be required by a range of regulatory regimes that have already passed or are pending in the EU, UK, U.S. and at the state level in places like California. 

With environmental concerns around data centers making front-page news in cities around the world and significant efforts underway within the data center industry to raise awareness of looming government oversight, the Uptime Institute team expressed surprise that the data center industry is still well behind the eight ball on its preparation to comply with these mandates. 

“In some regions, it has been impossible to escape the clamor for this data, so you would expect organizations to have it,” Lawrence said. “So it’s a little bit concerning, and in Europe, it’s particularly concerning because it’s becoming mandatory.”

The lack of sustainability data also calls into question firms' ability to meet their own sustainability goals or those of their tenants.

The report points to Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions as an essential part of substantiating claims toward carbon neutrality, yet few organizations report them, concluding that the majority of operators do not have the data to back up their corporate net-zero goals. 

Much of the data that companies do track and report is of poor quality and limited usefulness, Lawrence said, citing a review of the initial submissions to EU officials under the body’s Energy Efficiency Directive.

The report points specifically to companies purchasing carbon credits or other offsets that, with varying degrees of legitimacy, on paper eliminate the carbon footprint of a data center's energy use even if it uses fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Similarly, measures of supply chain emissions often amount to little more than guesses, according to the report. 

The result is that there is little of the transparency and actionable data that these reporting requirements intended to create. 

“Frankly, the quality of the data that has been provided by the data center operators is very concerning and very poor,” Lawrence said. “It is nearly impossible to make comparisons from one company to another or even to make a clear, dispassionate, objective assessment of what somebody’s sustainability metrics, goals and achievements are.”