SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
providers . It has also supported the efforts of world leading businesses to expand their services across the region . Here customers include Interxion ( a Digital Realty Company ), Iron Mountain , SuperNAP and EcoDataCenter , the world ’ s first climate positive data centre .
“ The interesting part is that connectivity demands are growing across the entire region , and in southern and central Europe , new hubs are beginning to establish themselves to service this requirement . We ’ re seeing the build out of new data centres in Warsaw , Tel Aviv , Athens and Milan , nowhere near the FLAP countries . We ’ re more than prepared here , seeing this evolution once in North America and now experiencing it through a slightly different lens , there ’ s a lot of similarities between the two . Interestingly , the word sustainability was not used quite as frequently , five , six , seven years ago . Now it ’ s very much in the forefront of our discussions , if not the first thing we talk about with decision-makers .”
The importance of standardised measurements Talking about what sustainability needs is one thing – providing a means to achieve it is another .
One of the biggest issues in sustainability is figuring out and agreeing , cross-sector and cross-organisation , how to measure it . That is where Schneider Electric ’ s Data Centre Sustainability Metrics and Framework , launched in December 2021 , comes in .
“ Last year I was on a panel with a couple of key industry leaders , and we were talking about each of our companies ’ focus on sustainability . You quickly realise that everyone is going about this a little bit differently , everyone is trying to measure what it means ,” says McKernan . “ We felt that one of the key challenges is that we ’ ve never really had a standard set of environmental metrics that we can report on both here in Europe and throughout the globe .”
Schneider Electric ’ s first-of-a-kind Sustainability Framework allows for the tracking and reporting of standardised sustainability metrics , helping drive internal collaboration to make it more effective in achieving company-wide targets , while increasing transparency for external stakeholders like customers and regulators . It was created by a team of ESG experts , sustainability consultants , data centre scientists and data centre solution architects to help operators who are at the
36 April 2022