It's no secret the data center industry consumes significantly more energy than traditional built environments. But rising energy costs, stakeholder pressures, and technological innovation are driving data centers toward greener pastures – with some analysts projecting that three-quarters of IT organizations will implement data center infrastructure sustainability initiatives by 2027.

That figure represents a substantial increase from less than 5% of IT orgs with data center sustainability programs in 2022, according to Gartner research. In addition to the obvious benefits of greener data centers (lower energy costs, less downtime, and a smaller carbon footprint), indirect impacts of sustainability programs include broader cost reductions, new and innovative products, and improved risk management and mitigation, Gartner's report noted.

Thorough data center sustainability programs can be complex and difficult to integrate, manage, and maintain, but there are straightforward changes IT organizations can make to reduce environmental impact, like identifying and transitioning to data center regions with high renewable energy availability and capacity.

Cloud management platform provider Cirrus Nexus recently studied power grid regions in Europe and the United States for a one-week period to determine which geographical areas are the cleanest and dirtiest in terms of environmental impact. The research found California tends to be the most consistently clean data center region, but the more significant findings pertain to "the frequency with which regions can fluctuate from clean and dirty over the course of a given timeframe," Cirrus Nexus CEO Chris Noble told SDxCentral.

The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, and those fluctuations in available renewable energy leave fossil fuel-based grid power to fill gaps in demand," Noble explained. In both the U.S. and Europe, renewable wind and solar power were responsible for a majority of the fluctuations in availability observed. Enterprises that monitor and predict those fluctuations, however, stand a chance at operating "their environments when and where is it both cheaper and greener," Noble added.

"Different regions can perform very differently depending on the window of analysis," he said. "For example, the Central region was one of the cleanest in the U.S. for our winter report, while it was one of the most carbon intense in our summer report. The biggest surprise remains that organizations and service providers are not taking advantage of these fluctuations to reduce their carbon footprints."

The CEO expects enterprise demand for sustainable operations in less carbon intensive geographies will lead cloud providers and data center operators to expand into those areas, which should funnel demand toward renewable energy sources. In addition, "as more companies become aware of the immediate changes they can make to reduce their carbon footprint, they will start to drive the demand for cleaner data centers and regions," Noble said.

And as technologies that support low-carbon operations become more affordable for enterprises, he anticipates data center providers will retrofit existing facilities for environmental optimization. "Demand from enterprises and government regulations and legislation," like the Inflation Reduction Act, he added, "should start to incentivize the industry to build greener data centers."

The research also highlighted internal and external barriers facing enterprises looking to move workloads to lower carbon intensity regions.

External factors, like data compliance regulations, could limit organizations from moving the physical location of workloads. In the European Union, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reduces organizations' ability to move data over borders. Geography can also be limiting in terms of latency; workloads running too far away from end users could add unnecessary latency issues.

Internally, enterprises mainly struggle with a "lack of awareness around the opportunity to reduce their carbon cloud footprint," Noble said. "Companies are used to thinking about scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, but they’re just starting to understand the carbon impact of their total business operations, which includes their scope 3 IT infrastructure and cloud resource consumption."

To that point, Noble recommends IT leaders who are focused on sustainable computing educate stakeholders across the organization to ensure continued support of sustainable initiatives.