HPE Discover, Las Vegas – Choo choo, all aboard the green train! HPE CTO Fidelma Russo kicked off her keynote last week with demonstrations of the various new-and-improved GreenLake services — including its new sustainability dashboard.
The dashboard — a new software-centric sustainability interface to easily monitor IT energy consumption, carbon emissions and electricity costs — was officially announced on June 5th along with a series of service enhancements designed to help enterprises reduce the carbon footprint of their IT workloads and operations. The dashboard is set to be made available to customers later this year. Already it has drawn interest from big name companies. Russo noted partners such as Nokia, Danfoss, SweetCo and the Ryder Cup are “actively evaluating the dashboard.”
Sune Tornbo Baastrup, SVP and CIO at Danfoss, explained in an interview with Silverlinings that the two companies are working together to capture and reuse heat generated from data centers. Danfoss, a broad industrial engineering company, has a strong focus on the cooling and heat recovery business. Data centers notoriously generate huge amounts of heat.
“That energy doesn’t just go away, it just transforms mediums, from electricity to heat, from heat back to electricity or hydrogen, and we are experts in those energy transitions," Baastrup explained.
These energy transitions can go back into powering or heating other enterprise buildings, and in some cases, they can even be used to heat entire residential communities where the infrastructure is possible. “This is a vastly untapped energy source that we need to do something about,” he said.
The company has developed heat recovery solutions, and Baastrup says a huge amount of its own technology advances comes from working with HPE. Danfoss’ headquarters data center in Denmark is fully operated by GreenLake, and it works in collocation with Equinix data centers — another HPE partner — outside of Washington D.C. and Baltimore.
A holistic approach
HPE Chief Sustainability Officer Monica Batchelder talked big picture enterprise strategies in an interview with Silverlinings at HPE Discover. She said that many leading companies target sustainability initiatives that, while successful, “are limited in scale [and] are often not part of a holistic strategy integrated into and woven throughout the business.”
Many challenges stand in the way of a broad approach, including “a shortage of expertise to implement a sustainable IT strategy, the complexity of driving sustainability in a hybrid IT reality with a lack of visibility and metrics, inefficiencies across the lifecycle lead to larger environmental impact, [and an] escalating and complex regulatory environment,” she said.
HPE and Danfoss approach the work differently, according to Baastrup. “I have to say, that's also one of the things that tremendously energizes and engages me in our collaboration. Our companies have this very strong and common view that sustainability is not something you bolt on to your business. It is how you do your business and it is your business going forward.”
HPE’s internal efforts
Betchelder noted that HPE has made progress on its internal sustainability goals as well. “We reached our goal of obtaining 50% of our energy from renewable sources by 2025 three years early. Our 2040 net-zero target is, of course, a longer term objective,” she said. HPE CEO Antonio Neri explained during a press Q&A the 2040 target was moved up from 2050.
Additionally, in the last two years “HPE’s operational [Scope 1 and 2] emissions decreased 21% from our 2020 baseline, putting us on our way to reducing these emissions within our direct control 70% from that baseline by 2030,” Betchelder continued. Neri noted during the press Q&A Scope 3 emissions (which are those of HPE’s suppliers) were flat.
Betchelder concluded HPE will continue to develop a “roadmap that will ensure our portfolio solves customers’ sustainable IT pain points.”