Wildfires rage across the Western United States. Hurricanes leave costly devastation in their wake. Flooding, drought, air pollution, and other natural disasters fill news feeds on a near-daily basis. These are the tangible effects of climate change, and they're demanding the world pays attention.

The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the spending plan includes billions of dollars to increase the nation's clean energy supply and reduce the effects of climate change. Meanwhile, the Senate-approved bill includes $73 billion to fund renewable energy — only half the amount that the Biden administration initially proposed.

“This bill includes important sustainability provisions for clean, renewable energy, reducing automotive emissions, and upgrading decades-old utility infrastructure, but it doesn’t go far enough,” ITRenew CEO Aidin Aghamiri said in a statement.

Transitioning to clean energy is essential to reduce fossil fuel consumption, lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and avoid irreparable degrees of warming.

Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations warn that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels is a likely reality in the next 20 years if substantial climate action doesn't happen. Both reports, and the scientific community at large, urge governments to take significant measures to eliminate GHG emissions as rapidly as possible.

The Race to Net Zero In the meantime, corporations are racing to produce environmental, society, and governance (ESG) reports and set long-term, net-zero emissions targets — a path the data center industry is well-acquainted with.

The industry appears to recognize the large amount of resources it uses and the crucial role it will continue to play in powering a green future.

“[Sustainability] leadership is going to come from our sector,” said Kyle Myers, CyrusOne’s director of environmental health, safety, and sustainability. “We're going to be part of the conversation, and we're going to be part of the solution.”

This is more than just talk. The industry has a proven track record of taking action.

Hyperscalers Google and Microsoft grabbed the top two spots on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership National Top 100 list last month.

Other infrastructure vendors like Dropbox currently rely on 100% renewable energy. To reach this target, Dropbox initially focused on increasing the efficiency of its hardware to lower the amount of energy needed to power its data centers, and then turned to carbon offsetting and renewable energy credits.

Many others in the industry have committed to renewable energy targets with deadlines of 2030 or sooner. Cloudflare committed to be carbon neutral by 2022 and eliminate its legacy footprint by 2025.

But not all providers are “equally successful” in sustainability efforts, analyst Edward Ferrara said during an IDC virtual event. “We're seeing a fair amount of variability in terms of what the service providers have offered in terms of sustainability goals, but also what they're actually achieving,” he explained. “Some are quite good, and some are still struggling with this topic.”

Is Sustainability Worth Its Price Tag? A report by CloudBolt Industry Insights found 79% of IT leaders surveyed are expected by executive leadership or a board of directors to help their companies implement environmental sustainability initiatives. The report also showed 67% of IT leaders “definitely” take a cloud vendor’s sustainability initiatives into consideration when choosing a provider.

Only 41% of respondents, however, said they would pay a premium price (11-15% more) for sustainable cloud services. This shows the cost of operating sustainably is a barrier to widespread adoption of environmentally-conscious practices.

That principle is similarly applied to government-level climate action. The infrastructure bill includes $73 billion to transition the nation’s power grid to renewable energy — a lower sum than what was proposed before the Senate trimmed $1.3 trillion off the bill.

High upfront costs and loss of jobs are two common reasons used to oppose transitioning away from fossil fuels, but research suggests those will not be long-term issues.

A study from Stanford University models outcomes of a transition to 100% wind, water, and solar power across all sectors in 139 countries. The model shows this type of green transition would create 24.3 million net long-term, full-time jobs, reduce overall energy costs, and reduce power requirements by 42.5%. That’s in addition to avoiding 1.5 degrees of warming and increasing global access to electricity.

Ferrara also noted that the costs of solar and wind power are “now approaching the cost of carbon resources,” which highlights the increasing practicality of green power.

While the climate-focused funding in the infrastructure bill is a step in the right direction, Myers recognizes that the data center industry still needs to have a sense of climate responsibility. “Data centers are going to be in the center of solving for climate change,” Myers said. “We have to be part of the solution.”

One way to move the clean energy transition forward is to look to European data centers’ renewable energy successes. “It's replicating what others have already done, and then hoping that Biden's administration continues to support and invest in things like infrastructure or research,” Myers said.

Aghamiri echoed that the U.S. government should be doing more to move away from fossil fuel dependency. “For us to make real headway in terms of decarbonization, we need to tackle this at the source with much more intent and focus,” he said. “We need to fix the errors of the past, then look forward, incentivizing companies to have a much more circular view on design, consumption and reuse.”