A zero carbon framework for the industry

5 KEY STEPS

1. Invest in clean energy for the long haul, and buy local

Our road to sustainability has always been customer-driven, so it can be best understood in the context of evolving customer needs. We recognised in 2017 that customers wanted their data center power to have positive environmental performance, and we established offtake agreements with renewable energy providers to cover our whole operational load. This approach has become popular: the price of renewables has been extremely competitive, and last year nearly 45 GW of renewable power in the US – well over half of the world’s corporate clean energy purchases - was contracted to data centers. In 2019 we launched Green Power Pass to pass the benefit of clean power onto customers; GPP is a certificate customers can use for their environmental reporting to credibly reflect the use of clean power at our facilities.

A common instrument to procure clean power has been the Virtual Power Purchase Agreement. This has enabled massive corporate support for clean energy projects in many markets. While many grids have become greener in the process, the project location has often not been within the same grid where the energy buyer uses power. The reality that a project supported in one grid area may not make any impact in decarbonizing the power a company consumes in another is causing our customers to begin asking about the provenance of clean power claims. This is a positive evolution as it will help support decarbonization in all grids, for everyone. Regrettably, market conditions often make it impossible to ‘buy local’, making it important to support groups like the Clean Energy Buyers Association that are working hard to advocate for policies that unlock access to clean power in restrictive markets.

Power Purchase Agreements and selecting local, quality clean power rate programs where they exist are important demand signals to the market that we need more clean power. Committing to long term off take from local new projects does more than just secure a credible green power claim, it demonstrates real commitment over only purchasing certificates on an annual basis.

2. Build a Customer-focused Framework

Building on the customer theme, in May 2021 we committed ourselves to further decarbonize our power beyond traditional annual matching. This is a natural next step as we’re collectively recognizing that annually matching our load leaves a lot of hours dependent on fossil-based generation. There has been growing support for 24/7 Carbon Free Energy by companies, communities and even governments - and these are data center customers! Clearly this growing number of climate minded organizations will seek providers that enable them to turn their data center footprint into a lever for supporting hour by hour clean energy. We did not abandon our past renewable energy VPPAs, as they play an important role in our overall coverage as we transition to more granular clean energy. Today we have a portfolio of solutions activated in support of helping customers achieve their clean energy goals. This includes our most impactful, local and hourly clean energy matching, long term Power Purchase Agreements and also some short term certificate purchases. Creating this framework supports all of our customers’ sustainability needs while we continue our journey towards locally sourced and carbon-free power every minute of every day, everywhere.

3. Track Sites & Build Carbon Heatmaps

Generation and consumption tracking is the key – creating time-tagged heatmaps that show where our customer’s hourly IT load is being matched with clean energy and where the gaps are that we need to cover. As a first step to this goal, we developed an agreement with RPD Energy and Direct Energy to track hourly renewable energy supply and compare it to our load. We then started working with Cleartrace for our US data centers, and Flexidao in Europe, to capture data on how we are performing and generate traceable, verifiable reporting. This is a gradual but necessary process. By January 2023 we were able to announce renewable tracking across over 100 Iron Mountain facilities on two continents. Collectively, the sites now under hourly clean energy tracking represent over 40% of our annual electricity consumption.

4. Align with common standards

Our decarbonization performance materializes into our customers’ published results. They need to be able to trust the performance figures and methodologies we use as they take these figures and put them into their own reports. Trust is created through transparency and use of common standards. For reporting GHG emissions, we have aligned our efforts with the ISO 14064-1 standard and have our results verified by a third party to confirm our use of standard methodologies. IMDC is currently the only global colocation company that has had its GHG emissions verified by a third party to the ISO 14064 standard.

5. Never stop innovating

Purchasing large amounts of power for our customers to use inside our facilities creates opportunities to support new and exciting decarbonization solutions. This may be small, infill projects like our May 2023 Corporate Power Purchase Agreement (CPPA) with Sunrock for solar energy from the port of Rotterdam abd Oud Gastel to our AMS-1 Amsterdam facility, or larger, complex efforts like our innovative June 2023 ‘run of river’ hydro development PPA with Rye Development, to add generators to existing dams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia which could create up to 150 MW of clean power. Innovative approaches to clean energy today can become widely accessible, common best practices in the future. Rooftop and ground mounted solar are good examples of matured solutions that are first moves for clean energy in most places around the world, like our largest rooftop solar array of any US data center in New Jersey or recent array in Rosendale, NY, which takes our global on-site generation capacity to 21.3 MW.

Innovation is an iterative process that builds on what we have done to continue exploring new ways we can close the gap to 100% carbon free energy. Solving the last 10% will become incrementally more difficult and expensive and this will require investments in new technologies, new storage and new generation types.

How We’re Doing

This is a long-term undertaking, and we are still in the foothills of the zero carbon mountain, but benchmark results have been extremely encouraging.

Our Carbon Usage Effectiveness score for 2022 was 9,970,000 KGCO2EQ / 427,985,611 KWH which equals a score of 0.013. In 2021 this was 0.023. 2023 figures will be published on Earth Day, April 22, 2024. While we cannot yet publish these figures, over the first two years we saw an improvement of 77% and we are confident we have improved on this over the last year.

In 2023 we made excellent progress in our four initial pilot sites. Our facilities in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey achieved 99.5%, 99.9%, and 98.5% carbon-free power for January, February and March 2023 respectively. Throughout April the power they used was 100% matched with locally produced carbon-free energy each hour of every day. For the full year of 2023 we achieved over 94% of the hours matched with locally produced clean power (see graphic). Take a moment to consider that. Clean energy resources like wind, solar and hydro are intermittent, and we’re demonstrating that it is possible to match nearly every hour of each day with locally produced carbon free energy. This is an inspiring milestone in the clean energy transition.

We are also discovering new customer opportunities. Many of our largest customers already have extremely sophisticated sustainability reporting in place, and are keen to report on total decarbonisation. Some are even asking us for a carbon-free matchmaking service wherein, long-term PPAs with clean energy projects can be matched directly to their electricity use in our facilities. This helps us with our power commitment planning in the same way that an anchor customer accelerates the business case for a new facility. We can accelerate our zero carbon power progress in direct response to customer needs and provide them the most credible claim to supporting new clean energy. It’s a proactive partnership, where we are a trusted clean energy partner that boosts customer sustainability performance to new levels.

Join the Journey

We believe the data center industry has an important role to play in global decarbonization as we support a more digitized future. By investing in long term, local clean energy in support of helping our customers achieve their carbon reduction goals, and tracking performance to industry standards while we continue innovating towards closing the gap to 24/7 clean power are already seeing the potential for real progress. We hope this will have a positive knock-on effect with other data centers and are on hand to help.

Please get in touch with any questions if you are considering taking the total decarbonisation path, either as a customer or an operator. To be notified of our full 2023 progress in the upcoming Iron Mountain Data Centers Sustainability Report, please register here [add link]