Colocation provider Iron Mountain decided powering its data centers with 100% renewable energy isn't enough to achieve global decarbonization goals.

"The normal 100% renewable [energy] claim that we've had in the past, and most companies have today, still leaves a lot of carbon on the grid," Iron Mountain Director of Energy and Sustainability Chris Pennington told SDxCentral.

Following in Google's footsteps, Iron Mountain aims to power its data centers with 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE) by 2040. CFE is bound to be a "more important piece of how the world adopts a more sustainable digital future," and these efforts were "born out of this awareness," Pennington said.

As a colocation data center operator, most of the power consumed inside Iron Mountain's facilities isn't actually owned by the provider. "It belongs to our customers who set up servers inside our critical environments, and they run their critical platforms," Pennington said. "Our customers can't go and form their own utility agreement for power inside our site. They're relying on us to provide it to them."

To that point, Iron Mountain recognizes that its role in the energy supply chain comes with the responsibility to provide "the power [customers] would choose to buy on their own," Pennington noted.

More enterprises will likely follow Google and Iron Mountain's efforts to evolve beyond 100% renewable energy commitments, he said. Those types of goals are based on renewable energy credits (RECs) or virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs) that allegedly supply renewable power to grids where the company may or may not operate. "That's why we set this goal recognizing that we are part of this energy supply chain to our customers," he said.

In terms of its own energy procurement, Iron Mountain procures "energy that is better matched from local sources with how we consume it," and tracks its performance with third-party providers like Cleartrace. "We're getting down to the point where we actually have visibility of, hour by hour, where our power is coming from and what the remaining carbon content is off the grid for the hours that aren't matched."

Although the colo provider hasn't quite reached the hourly granularity it's striving for, "none of our customers are asking for our hourly granularity emissions yet," he admitted. But those ambitions make "us very well-positioned to be able to communicate this level of granularity" when it inevitably becomes more important to cloud customers.

Iron Mountain's efforts to approach sustainability with a more aggressive strategy echo recent scientific guidance that suggests decarbonization needs to be accelerated if the world hopes to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

An artificial intelligence (AI) research model from Stanford University and Colorado State University analyzed a range of global climate model simulations to determine timelines for when the planet will cross incremental temperature thresholds.

Using spatial pattern data from historical temperature observations, the researchers found a 70% chance global temperature rise will reach the two-degree mark between 2044 and 2065, even if carbon emissions quickly decline. While that change might seem small, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted the impacts at 2C compared to 1.5C of warming are as significant as double the plant habitat loss and triple for insects.