Environmental Transformation and Climate

National Data Center Operator Expedient’s Quest for Sustainability

Written by Staff Writer

Expedient operates data centers and cloud infrastructure platforms in 14 locations throughout the United States. Through specialization and centralization, Expedient technology enables clients to operate their business in a reliable manner and take advantage of significant environmental optimizations through our economies of scale.

We have a responsibility to track and reduce energy use, minimize carbon emissions and focus on sustainability. Our recent assessment from the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) organization indicated a preliminary score of 88 out of 100 for the combined environmental, social, and governance categories, which earned us a second place ranking amongst our participating data center peers in North America.

Our team continuously researches new technologies and industry developments to operate more efficiently and sustainably. We have undertaken several initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint, significantly extend the useful life of equipment, and lessen our reliance on hazardous compounds such as lead, acids and silica.

A recent $2.9M investment in these two projects in Pittsburgh reduced emissions of our redundant data center power plants:

  • Replacement of our data center Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) systems in one of our Pittsburgh data centers. The new UPS technology yielded a reduction of more than 1,100 tons of carbon dioxide emissions on one year.
  • Replacement of valve regulated lead acid (VRLA) batteries inside UPS systems. Typically, we would replace these batteries every three years, to ensure reliability. Our lithium ion battery initiative has eliminated the need to replace batteries every three years and extend the battery life to over ten years. This change reduces the use of lead and silica and greatly reduce our scope 3 emissions driven by our heterogeneous customer workload profiles.

More information at www.expedient.com.

CONTACT:
Ken Hill, Chief Technology Officer
ken.hill@expedient.com
(412) 316-2803

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Staff Writer