T5 Signs Historic Climate Accord for Data Center Industry

By CIOReview | Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Atlanta, GA - Expanding its commitment to sustainable development,T5 Data Centers, a global leader in data center construction and facilities management, has become a founding member of the historic Infrastructure Masons (iMasons) Climate Accord, a groundbreaking agreement among key industry players to address climate change.

Members of the accord pledge to promote global carbon accounting of digital infrastructure, providing critical data that could drive the industry to achieve carbon neutrality, as the first step to ‘Net Zero’.

“We are proud to be part of this ambitious and critical initiative. The iMasons Climate Accord establishes important objectives to measure and reduce a site’s carbon footprint. The industry as a whole is moving toward more responsible, proactive sustainability standards and the Accord reflects this growing consensus,” says Craig McKesson, Chief Customer Officer for T5.

In addition to T5, other members of the coalition include hyperscale providers Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, and software service providers nZero and Cato, as well as power utilities, equipment vendors and colocation facilities.

“The iMasons Climate Accord is an important step to unite the industry on reaching carbon neutrality,” said Dean Nelson, Chairman and Founder of Infrastructure Masons. “We applaud T5 for joining the Accord. Collaborating with industry peers will compound the results, accelerating everyone’s progress towards this critical goal.”

The iMasons Climate Accord is the first of its kind in the industry and is designed to establish an open standard to report carbon emissions in data center power, materials and products. The goal is to make sustainable data center design, construction, and operation choices more transparent, effective, and cost-efficient, reducing the obstacles to adopting sustainable practices.

The Accord lays out a number of specific steps to provide transparency, traceability and identification of the carbon history of data center products and buildings. A CarbonTrack monitoring unit installed on data center devices, for example, records any changes impacting carbon emissions, such as maintenance or component replacement. Similar units installed on a data center structure would provide the total embodied carbon of all construction materials and products that make up that data center, including any changes such as retrofits, expansions, and product replacements over the structure’s lifecycle.

The Maturity Model proposed in the Accord would show the progress of reducing source power carbon and embodied carbon in materials, products and power.

Since 2008, T5 has been helping its customers strategically plan and implement sustainable practices from initial design through procurement and construction. Now, T5 is taking big steps toward reducing the industry’s carbon footprint in two significant ways: by working with its partners at nZero, a 24/7 carbon management platform that gives NGOs, government agencies and organizations the accurate emissions data they need to reach net zero, and by using software from Cato, a company that unlocks stranded power in existing data centers to increase utilization and avoid unnecessary data center construction. The partnerships allow T5 to provide its customers with real-time, efficient and transparent digital carbon tracking and reporting.