2013 Forum – Data Center Life Cycle Analysis

05 March, 2013 | Presentation

Christophe Garnier, Schneider Electric


The environmental impact, also called environmental footprint, of products and organizations is becoming a major topic driven by the needs of customer information, policymakers, and compliance towards regulation. Standards organizations, industry consortia, and regulatory bodies develop tools with the same goal: assessing the environmental impact of the product or the organization. However, each tool has its own specific interest range, life cycle stages, product ranges, and sometimes its own particular requirements.

Most of these methodologies for assessing environmental impacts can apply to a data center. The objective of The Green Grid aims to provide the industry with a framework and rules to describe the specificities of a data center, so that all the different methodologies can at least evaluate a data center in the same way. This common framework is intended to be used by owners, renters, and users of data centers in order to harmonize environmental studies.