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.