Swiss organisation wins award for tracking data centre pollution

Data centres account for around 7% of Switzerland’s total electricity consumption. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

The impact of data centres on the environment and the climate is hard to measure. The Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association has recently won international recognition for a tool that assesses the facilities’ footprints.

Any activity that uses the internet – working from home with a computer, paying for dinner with a credit card, or generating an image with artificial intelligence – relies on data centres. These buildings full of servers host the IT infrastructure needed to process and transmit digital data.

The number of data centres is increasing in Switzerland and around the world. As a result, energy consumption and CO₂ emissions are growing as well. Data centres use around 7% of Switzerland’s electricity, and this could more than double by 2030. Most of the electricity powering the facilities often comes from fossil fuels, and large amounts of water are required to cool the IT equipment.

>> How does a data centre work? 

Despite sustainability commitments across the tech sectorExternal link, the real environmental impact of data centres is largely unknown. Various indicators measure the energy used, but they do not reveal how efficiently servers, storage systems, and network devices use that electricity to make our modern internet work. This gap makes it difficult to assess progress towards carbon neutrality in the digital world.

“Unfortunately, when discussing data centre sustainability, nobody considers the IT component,” says Matthias Haymoz of the Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association (SDEA), a consortium of companies and academic institutions formed in 2020 to reduce the environmental and climate impact of data centres. “This is a problem because today 80% of a data centre’s energy goes into IT.”

The SDEA launched its online navigatorExternal link to fill this information gap in 2024. The tool is the first in the world to evaluate a data centre’s entire energy balance, and it recently received an award at one of the leading global events for data centres. The recognition is a sign that while data centres remain essential for our connected world, a growing number of organisations wish they had more transparency about their energy use.

Data centre servers are not used to their capacity

Accessible online, the SDEA navigator measures a data centre’s sustainability based on 12 months of real operational data. It analyses four key aspects: infrastructure energy efficiency, IT utilisation efficiency, CO₂ emissions, and water consumption – providing a complete assessment of a centre’s environmental impact. 

>> We explained how the Swiss navigator works at the time of its launch:

The tool is supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. It can be used – for a fee – by companies offering space and infrastructure in their data centres, as well as by clients who own their IT equipment.

Around 30 users, mostly in Europe, have registered since the calculator’s launch in July 2024, Haymoz says. According to him, the largest potential for improvement lies not with data centres themselves but with their customers (banks, public administrations, SMEs, etc.).

In a modern and efficient data centre, most of the energy is consumed by IT systems, which are the responsibility of customers, Haymoz notes. “Today, according to IBM estimatesExternal link, a server is used at an average of 12–18% of its capacity, even though it could safely be increased to 80%.” 

This means that most servers stay powered on and consume significant energy while doing relatively little work. To put it simply, it’s like leaving the television switched on without watching it.

In large companies, Haymoz continues, thousands of servers remain underutilised – and no one notices because sustainability teams and IT departments often don’t communicate with each other. “Yet optimising IT infrastructure could represent a significant source of savings: less energy consumed, fewer licences, less software,” he says.

Switzerland is among the countries with the highest density of data centres in the world (pictured is a facility in canton Aargau). Keystone / Christian Beutler

An award for helping to make data centres greener

Data Centre World in London – the world’s largest annual event dedicated to the data centres industry – recognisedExternal link the SDEA calculator for its “special contribution” to improving energy efficiency. The award was presented on March 4 by an independent panel of experts.

The SDEA tool scored highly in every category, explains John Booth, director of the consultancy Carbon3IT and a member of the jury. It was recognised for enabling more environmentally responsible operations and producing clear, measurable results on energy efficiency of data centres.

“The use of this tool provides a ‘baseline’ of evidence,” Booth wrote in an email to Swissinfo. The next step, he added, could be to implement recommendations from the European Union’s Code of Conduct for the energy efficiency of data centres, a voluntary initiative that encourages operators to adopt sustainable practices.

According to Matthias Haymoz, the international recognition of the SDEA calculator “shows that the sector is moving away from isolated indicators towards comprehensive metrics, and from sustainability pledges to verified standards.” 

The first step to reducing the carbon footprint of a data centre

Digital Realty – one of the world’s largest data centre operators – used the Swiss calculator for all three of its facilities in Glattbrugg, near Zurich. “We wanted to strengthen transparency around how we measure and communicate our sustainability performance,” Carlos Alves, Digital Realty’s Capacity & Energy Manager, told Swissinfo.

The company already had an internal system for monitoring key performance indicators. The added value of the SDEA calculator, Alves explains, was providing an external point of reference and a more standardised way to interpret differences across facilities. “This is increasingly important, as customers look for measurable and independently verified indicators.”

All three Digital Realty data centres in Glattbrugg received the SDEA’s highest certification – Gold PlusExternal link – which confirms above-average energy performance. For example, the heat generated by servers is recovered and used to warm nearby buildings.

Most of the company’s optimisation measures had already been identified internally, Alves adds. That said, the SDEA calculator can still be valuable in highlighting opportunities for improvement, especially for operators at earlier stages of their efficiency journey.

In a rapidly expanding and high‑impact sector, tools like the SDEA calculator show that accurate measurement is the first step towards reducing consumption and emissions of data centres. The challenge now will be turning these optional tools into widely adopted best practices.

Edited by Gabe Bullard/ts

A cura di Gabe Bullard/ts