Speakers:

Christian Belady, Vice President at Microsoft

Susanna Kass Data Center Advisor to UNSDG

Kenneth Davies-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Birch Infrastructure

Reid Spolek member of the Energy & Location Strategy team at Google

Friday, December 11, 2020, 12pm - 1pm PT / 3pm - 4pm EST

Did you know that Big Tech is responsible for roughly 4% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide? That's twice the emissions of the civil aviation industry! By 2025, the information and communications technology sector could consume 20% of the world’s electricity to power things like internet-connected devices, video streaming, emails, cloud computing, and surveillance cameras, making data centers the planet’s largest energy users. Tech firms talk a lot about their green goals, so how do they plan to make these data centers more environmentally friendly or even carbon neutral?

Throughout December, the Cornell Energy Connection will host a series of virtual events featuring experts sharing their perspectives on key issues impacting the sector, such as the inequitable access to clean energy and the ongoing evolution of energy storage.

This session will focus on the energy challenges for data centers, what is already being done to minimize their emissions, and what energy-saving technologies we can expect to see in the near future.

Susanna Kass is going to speak at Critical Connections: Greening the TMT Sector on Dec 9, 2020 at 14:00 GMT / 21:00 HKT / 15:00 CEST / 09:00 EST. She will be sharing her views on how the ICT industry shall invest in improving their sustainable design.

Summary of the webinar session:

The ICT infrastructure industry has a choice to contribute to carbon emissions or to be part of the solution. Now is the time for business leaders to commit to measurable actions, which will drive personal investment in improving sustainability across the board.

Rising consumer and investor interest (reflecting rises in extreme weather events and temperatures) is causing organizations in all industries to examine emission sources - and this is turning attention to power hungry data centres.

In this session, two of the world's leading experts on sustainability and data centres - Susanna Kass and Mark Monroe - discuss key issues, breakthroughs and strategies that illuminate the path forward for organizations that are balancing burgeoning IT demand and new approaches to low-impact supply.

Click the Speakers below to check their profiles on the event page.

The first APAC Women Conference 2020 held by Microsoft between December 1st and 4th, 2020. Through out the sessions, there are great thought leadership sharing their inspiring stories, words of wisdoms and advices.

Susanna Kass, Data Center Advisor of UN and a member of Climate 50, will also be speaking on the 4th for the “Vision of Leadership” joining other great line-up speakers, Linh Thai, CEO of TVL Group and Lin Nah Tan, CEO of International University & Colleges.

This session is hosted by Yiling Lai, APAC Director, Architect, CSA Lead - Data Center Engineering, Microsoft.

Nov. 11, 2020, 9 a.m. PT / 5 p.m. GMT — Nov. 11, 2020, 9 a.m. PT / 6 p.m. GMT

With Europe's Green Deal, considerable emphasis is being put on the role of ICT and digital infrastructure in the collaborative fight to reach important climate change goals by 2030 and beyond.

The Horizon 2020 projects, which are now coming to a conclusion, have funded a number of data center specific work groups in order to provide solutions to these challenges and will continue to do so with the upcoming Horizon Europe projects.

In this session we will hear from three H2020 projects currently underway, focused on the use of fuel cells and energy and heat reuse, and debate their real world viability.

This session will explore how the circular approach can be applied to the data center industry.

Join this session and find out how you can incorporate sustainable data center design and measurements into your next generation data center design.

The speakers will share their view of the symbiotic relationship of Net Zero Data Centers harmonizing with Circular Economy communities. The social benefits to the communities provide a positive environmental and economic impact to our stakeholders, including our planet, investors, employees, customers, suppliers and the community location with a triple bottom line.

Moderated by: Merima Dzanic, COO, Danish Data Center Industry

This webinar completed on Oct 28. If you are interested, feel free to click the link below to request access to the full presentation.

This is a special webinar for the Data Center and Clean Energy professionals to gain insightful experience from the industry pioneers who have won numerous innovation awards for their sustainable designs and running megawatt scale data centers with Clean Energy across the globe to tackle Climate Change.

Webinar Host:
Susanna Kass, a member of Climate 50, the topmost influential climate change leader for the Data Center/ICT sector. Energy Fellow, Stanford University
Webinar VIP speakers:
Jim Collins, Director of Energy Market, Microsoft
Alberto Ravagni, Clean Energy Architect & Co-founder of InfraPrime
Olivier Bucheli, Chief Business Development Officer, Solid Power
Bryan Batson, EVP, Chief Public Affairs Officer, Southern Company Gas

The Climate Crisis is here. Countdown has started… 

Join this webinar with Ole Kjeldsen, Microsoft National Officer for Denmark and Island and Dr. Alberto Ravagni, Carbon Free Energy Architect, co-founder at InfraPrime at the Net Zero Technical webinar on October 21st!

This fireside chat will be led by Susanna Kass, a member of Climate 50, Energy Fellow at Stanford University on the Microsoft Carbon Negative Pledge to transition to Clean Cloud for global Corporate companies and how Net Zero Data Centers are instrumental for a Clean Energy Era. 

Join us and find out the Microsoft Sustainability Journey of a clean cloud and how you can incorporate keysights to use sustainable design to your data centers.  

This Net Zero Technical webinar has completed on Oct 21, 2020.

Please click the link below to request the full access to the presentation and downloadable slides from Ole Kjeldsen.

The forces of change have accelerated over the past 12 months and this is impacting data centers. The experts will discuss what has been learned from local and global impact factors in terms of the design and operation of future data centers and associated infrastructure. What technologies, systems and thinking will shape the transition to future infrastructure?  

This session took place on October 6, 2020

Data centres use an estimated 200 TWh each year, more than the annual energy consumption of some countries. They contribute around 0.3 per cent to overall carbon emissions, while the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem as a whole accounts for more than two per cent of global emissions. Achieving sustainability means addressing environmental considerations during solution design as well as during the build. Solutions must meet pre-defined and agreed environmental sustainability criteria. The green data centres must be designed to require fewer construction materials whilst delivering industry leading PUE (power usage effectiveness) levels resulting in a smaller carbon footprint when compared to similar data centres. Improvements are also required for water efficiency and cooling technologies as well as pairing facilities with sources of renewable energy.

In our data center industry, sustainability is becoming important and is an increasing requirement from business, regulatory and operational perspective. With so many promises out there to improve, however, what are the inputs to this strategy and how organizations move forward to execute on the sustainability agenda?

Susanna Kass, Energy fellow and Lecturer at Stanford University and member of the Climate 50, offered her perspectives with other panellists, Thibaut de la Bouvrie, Head of Solutions for Deloitte France and François Sterin, Chief Industrial Officer at OVHcloud.

If you have any questions regarding this event, please click here.

Listen to leading provider Tesla and the architect of the Data Center Dynamics (DCD) Mission Critical Innovation Award on carbon free power approaches for your high availability data center. Uncover zero cost to you to start now due to clean energy incentives, and best practice for avoided cost of grid energy to transition to onsite CFE power generation, energy storage for net zero (carbon, emission, waste) results.

What will be the impact of the circular economy on the data center and ICT sector in 2020 and beyond?

A circular economy is based on the principles of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems. Can the data center industry embody such a system? What are the challenges? In this discussion Google and UNEP talk us through their different approaches to circular thinking, with insights from the National University of Singapore, and how these can potentially be transferred into the wider market. How can these models from across the globe be successfully expanded across the industry and what will this mean to the future of the data center and ICT sector?

About the webinar: The Danish Data Center Industry has together with COWI released a report on the state of the Danish data center market which delivers a 360-degree outlook of the industry. The report provides an in-depth overview of the market size, trends, and forecasts, maps out key market challenges, and sets out recommendations on how the regional industry can overcome these, paving the way for Denmark to become a global hub for sustainable data centers.

For more information on the report please visit: https://datacenterindustrien.dk/focusareas/danish-data-center-market-report-2020/

The role of the sustainability lead is relatively new for the modern enterprise but their ambitions are lofty and with help from their infrastructure partners, increasingly achievable. The vast majority of organizations have employed a hybrid IT strategy and for those with workloads in the ‘cloud’, it can be difficult to achieve true transparency as it pertains to the environmental footprint of computing. With this in mind, we are keen to unpick the role businesses are playing in tackling the climate emergency, all while balancing their corporate goals to increase profit margins and scale. How are the stewards of cloud contributing to the new green reality? Are they doing enough to set the pace for decarbonization or failing the customers who rely on them to help protect the planet’s precious resources?

This session took place on April 1, 2020.