Data centers are the infrastructure that supports the digital economy. Everything that happens in the digital sphere is processed in a data center; and this industry has to continue to respond to the digitization needs of society. The magnitude and boom of this sector can be understood with figures such as those of Spain DC. The employers’ association confirms that the projected capacity of data centers in the Community of Madrid is expected to reach 613 megawatts by 2026, backed by an accumulated investment of approximately 6.1 billion euros by that date. In this context, Sustainability is one of the most relevant issues in the industry.
The Data Center industry in Spain is “native sustainable”. This means that data center developments in the country have sustainability at the core of the strategy from their conception. Being a recent development, with more modern and efficient technology than that used by our European neighbors, the companies that make up the sector already take into account our footprint on the environment and seek to reduce it as much as possible, planning developments from scratch with a view to meeting the highest sustainability standards.
In this regard, last year saw the publication of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), which addresses this issue as applied to data centers. The Directive aims to reduce energy use in Europe by 11.7% by 2030, to help meet the EU Green Deal target of a 55% reduction in carbon emissions by the same date.
What do data centers bring to the table in terms of sustainability?
Economies of scale
A Data Center such as those operated by Nabiax houses the service platforms of numerous companies. This helps both efficiency and energy savings for two reasons: it avoids having a large number of small corporate data centers; and since they are specialized infrastructures, they have better levels of efficiency.
This specialization results in investments to implement the latest generation technology in data centers, thus obtaining a constant improvement in efficiency metrics in the use of resources.
Reduction of Carbon Emissions
The fact of housing the platforms and services of numerous companies in a single infrastructure avoids the emission of greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It would be comparable to the use of public transport instead of private vehicles: one bus avoids the circulation of 60 vehicles and is therefore less polluting.
Moreover, in our case, all Nabiax data centers are powered 100% by renewable energy, which substantially reduces emissions.
Monitoring and automation
Colocation’s data centers are always looking to improve the efficiency of all systems to ensure 24x7x365 operational continuity. This implies having BMS -Building Management Systems- that monitor in real time all the indicators of a Data Center to optimize its operation autonomously and greatly reduce the risk of human error. With these systems, infrastructure efficiency parameters are controlled more easily and quickly.
District Heating
This is an initiative that is already being considered in data centers to recirculate the heat generated by air conditioning systems to homes near the infrastructure, taking advantage of the thermal energy and significantly reducing electricity consumption in the data center environment.