The exponential growth in data traffic comes at the cost of significantly higher energy demands. During the past 10 years, the data center industry has been held accountable for having a massive carbon footprint by environmentalists — a footprint which size can only be matched by the aviation industry. In the wake of this, the EU Commission announced in February this year that the data center industry needs to become climate neutral by the year 2030. As part of the European Green Deal initiative unveiled in November last year, the decision is the starting point for several future initiatives aiming to drive the industry towards an era of climate-neutral data centers.

Indeed, data centers are voracious when it comes to energy consumption. In fact, they are estimated to consume between 1% and 3% of the world’s total available power. According to recent report by Savills Research*, data centers will use 20% of the world’s energy in 2025, corresponding to 5.5% of the global carbon footprint. Hence, data centers will stand for ICT’s largest share of global electricity production at 33%, followed by smartphones (15%) networks (10%) and TV (9%).

For many years Sweden has been in a leading position for sustainability initiatives and green energy production and Conapto, a Swedish data center colocation provider, is no exception.

Conapto are certified as a climate neutral company since 2019 and continues to invest in green and sustainable initiatives, most recently landing a renewal of the certificate as a climate neutral company also for 2020.

“As a local challenger to the big actors, predominantly US providers, we have set the agenda for green data center colocation in Sweden. We have been running our data centers on fossil free and renewable wind power compensated energy for over 10 years and together with low PUE numbers, heat reuse to district heating systems and innovative recycling options we are one of the greenest colocation providers in the Nordic region. The climate neutrality certification is the ultimate proof point that our customers now can continue to benefit from the fact that they are not impacting the climate when using our services” says Stefan Nilsson, CMO at Conapto.

The climate neutrality certification is established in collaboration with South Pole, an international organization that focuses on sustainability consulting, climate neutrality certifications and climate protection projects worldwide.