Leading data trio join ICA Climate Accord

Schneider Electric, Cato and T5 Data Centers are among the latest companies to join the Infrastructure Masons Climate Accord (ICA).

The ICA has now brought together over 70 leading companies, including hyperscale companies AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, to accelerate the digital infrastructure industry to carbon neutrality.

“Cato’s M9 software is enabled by Schneider Electric intelligent hardware,” said Joe Reele, Vice President of Solutions Architects at Schneider Electric, which was ranked the world's most sustainable corporation by Corporate Knights last year. 

“Data center ecosystems thrive when you achieve a harmonious balance between hardware and software to maximise efficiency, resiliency and sustainability. At Schneider Electric, we remain committed to driving data center sustainability through purposeful innovation and industry collaboration.”

Teri Klug, VP of Business Development at Cato, acknowledged that the most sustainable data center "is one that is never built".

"Cato’s M9 software unlocks stranded power capacity in data centers increasing utilisation and efficiency slowing the need to build more," she said.

Those that are built are to be "highly optimised" from day one, decreasing capital investments and associated embodied carbon.

Craig McKesson, Chief Customer Officer at T5, said by enabling elastic power through Cato’s M9 software, it can help its customers align their workloads to different SLAs, just like cloud. "The result is higher utilisation, lower costs and lower carbon," he said.

T5 is deploying Cato software across three US markets to enable their customers to maximise the use of power infrastructure and lower costs. This slows the deployment of additional resources, lowering the carbon emitted for every click across the portfolio.

In 2021, digital infrastructure included 7mn data centers worldwide representing 105GW of power capacity which consumed 594TWhs of energy, equating to 2.4% of global energy consumption. Currently, there is no universal labeling system or mechanism to measure embodied carbon over the life of the materials used to build data center facilities or the products that fill them.

It is essential to have industry adoption of an open standard to report carbon in data center materials and products, carbon intensity in power consumption, and a maturity model to report participant progress. 

Collaboration is key to compounding the results from the commitments of each of the ICA companies.

It aims to seed the next generation of infrastructure professional talent by raising $1mn for scholarships, and to date has raised $873,715.