Climate-Neutral Certification for Data Centers – Kim Gunnelius, Verne Global Finland

This is texturong TV. Hello and welcome to techstrong TV. I'm Bonnie Schneider.

And today I'm thrilled to be speaking with Kim gunnelius co-founder and CCO of Vern Global Finland. Kim is a sustainability leader in the industry driving the marketing and international sales of Verne Global. Finland's Climate neutral certified data center Services.

He also oversaw green certification initiatives that helped Vern Global Finland achieve the first hyperscale level climate neutral certification for a Nordic data center Kim. Thank you so much for joining us on Tech strong TV. I clear my pleasure.

Can you tell us more about your background and Vern Global Finland sustainability Journey? Absolutely. Yeah, and it most definitely is a journey because when when we were starting the priorities suddenly didn't seem so high especially among shall we say clients and the industry in general?

So we started in 2011 under the brand of fickle. So finish colocation. We were the first company to bring cold location to the finished Market at that time just before Google had done significant investment into Finland.

So they actually did a 600 million investment into a data center where they were using Innovative technology for cooling. So they were using seawater. And we kind of thought that the sustainability really is something that we want to focus on.

We felt strongly about it. So day one we started to use green energy. and we were also exploiting the benefits we have in the nordics of the cool climate.

So what we found was an underground network of tunnels where the temperature is always low. So this means for the date Center industry that you need to use less energy for cooling. So we seemed like fantastic idea to us and we decided to use a hundred percent green energy from day one.

So not only do you kind of save on the amount of energy that you need to use your also get the benefit of having everything green. That's great. And I was wondering if you could talk about data centers in general how they can leverage technology because a lot of people are looking to reduce their carbon footprint and they may be concerned about data centers in general.

Can you talk more about the the whole process of it and how it can make for a more sustainable business that turns to a green Data Center. Sure. So the three main areas that are causing carbon emissions are basically commissioning so constructing the data center itself and then operating keeping the sort of service going and then decommissioning.

So so that means that once you're done with the services, maybe you you need to demolish. Maybe you reuse the equipment. So all these three areas are quite key to have more green operations.

So on the construction site, there's a lot of new technology coming out actually in in just the recent couple of years. There's been for instance green concrete coming out. So this can be new technology where you put in CO2 into the actual concrete, which means that there's the overall sort of CO2 emissions are much lower.

You can also reuse concrete. So so use something from from an existing building. So on the operation Side by far the biggest component is the actual green energy itself.

So you want to meet be sure that you are using a data center or cloud service that is using 100% green. Now in our case for instance, it's 100% wind this can vary on the Geo and the availability. And then on the operation side, there's also a lot of stuff that you can do for instance heat reuse.

So using the excess Heat. In the future on the operation side some trends that we're seeing with regard to technology is for instance green hydrogen. So hydrogen has been available for a while, but the producing it in agreeing sustainable blood manner.

That's kind of just coming now and it's got its challenges both on the production side and the actual shows a usage side. It's it's a complex ecosystem, but that's that's something that's available on the or will soon be available on the operation side. A data centers balance the need for energy intensive Computing with the goal of reducing their carbon emissions.

so in many cases, this can be a problem, especially with old existing facilities. Where a typical maximum form for Iraq some some years ago was say using 10 kilowatts for that rack of 40 or so units. Now what's happening is that many of the providers are turning out servers that use much more power much much more power.

So in the old data centers, what you would need to do is build the whole backend to feed the power into the racks and also will the cooling. Now for instance in our data center, we're quite ready for this. So it doesn't have to be a conflict.

If if you've got this high performance Computing that's using a lot of power. We can actually cool all of that with free air cooling. So that's one of the benefits of the cool climate and also the whole Tech the whole data center has been built so that you can have different types of implementations in different areas of the data center so you can have class sort of Less power intensive racks in one area and then you can have high performance Computing using high density in another area and it's the same cooling system and because it kind of cools the whole data center in one go it it works well for such solution.

What are some of the best practices for integrating renewable energy sources into Data Center operations and how can Cloud native and digital transformation Technologies support this transition? Yeah, so so the number one thing of course for data center is to ensure that everything is green. Now.

There's a couple of ways that a data center can acquire green power. So for instance, you can use guarantees of origin. So this means that you're buying from the grid and the provider of the green energy is guaranteeing that everything that you're buying is green.

Now the other way of doing this is so called PPA or power purchase agreement. Now there you actually go out to the supplier and you commit to using something say for instance five megawatts over five years. Now the challenge with that is that you actually have to commit to using it or then you will be paying for for nothing.

So there's you know different options and there's different kind of drawbacks with a different options. Also, of course, what you can do is Implement your own so we have actually implemented for instance. A solar power plant on top of one of our data centers and you know up in the north where we are.

It's pretty dark in the winter time, but in the summertime, that's when we may need mostly the energy for cooling. It works very well for us. So even a sustainable form of energy that doesn't produce evenly can work well in this environment, which is a really great benefit.

What role can hyperscale Solutions play in promoting sustainability in the data center industry and how can they be leveraged to drive change? So hyperscale is really play a key role in our industry because they are such huge players. So they really drive the demand for our services.

So when hyperscaler comes to us and says, you know, they would like to purchase green data center Services then. That is really what drives us towards the green. Right and what drives the hyperscale is towards that is the demand towards them.

So ever all of the all of the end user customers and our response to that has been actually getting climate neutral certification. So that means that there's actually a third party looking at our sort of greenhouse gas numbers. So so doing this the customer can be sure that everything is climate neutral and that's that's really the way to go also for the hyperscale is I'm hoping that they will be using The third parties to check their numbers and also to be more open to provide the reporting to their own customers for some hyperscale is already provided information about you know, how green the services that the end users are using are in the end.

How does Verne Global Finland measure and report its sustainability efforts? And what metrics should Tech workers be aware of when assessing data centers environmental impact? yeah, so along with using a third party climate neutral certifier.

We have to provide extensive reporting. So we they use the greenhouse gas protocol the ghg protocol which is an international standard and they actually look through all of our purchases more or less. So if we buy equipment generators UPS's if we travel they take into account what we travel so so This is the way that we kind of get a focus on on being a sustainable in every sense and that's how the reporting is.

Is done for our part, so we do a full open greenhouse gas report. Now the second way that we do reporting is to our new owners because we were acquired last year by a company called digital nine infrastructure, which is a london-based unlisted on the London Stock Exchange. Now digital nines actual name comes from the un's sustainability.

Go number nine. That's why they call D9 so they are focusing entirely on sustainable digital infrastructure. And because they're listed they are requiring a significant amount of additional reporting from us.

So we reporting this also to our owners who are then publishing at least significant parts of this as a report. And and Reporting really is key to the openness. So that's that's the way that you can the customers can compare providers.

Well, we have one time for one more question. What is Vern global finland's vision for the future of sustainable data centers? Right.

So so our vision is that we can go beyond being climate neutral to be climate positive. Now, how can we do that? How can you have a positive impact on the environment?

So so up until now we've been focusing on the footprint. So the carbon emissions that are kind of caused by our activity. Now we can also have a positive impact for the stakeholders for instance with the heat reuse that we're using.

So we're buying a hundred percent green energy. We are feeding the excess heat back to the district heating grid which is using it to heat houses for instance. Now they have a certain footprint and what we are providing with our reuse green energy is a lower footprint for them.

So we talk about a positive hand print. So that's that's one way the other way we can have a positive impact is to to tell our customers how to optimize their software to use less energy. So these are a couple of examples and of course a positive impact can be you know, telling people about what we're doing.

So telling the industry about the best practices and this is also somewhere something we are active in. in The different forms and you know talking about these things giving ideas sharing ideas. There's a Greener data movement where we're very active where we we tell people to do something small about Sustainability today and then we give them lots of ideas.

You know what they can do. So keep us trying. Well, Kim, canelia's co-founder and CCO of Verne Global Finland.

Thank you so much for joining us on Tech strong TV. We appreciate your Insight and look forward to hearing more about Verne Global Finland in the future. Thank you very much.

My pleasure. Great. Well stay with us.

We'll be right back on text strong TV with more.