Tackling the Scope 3 issue
For our customers, our private cloud contact centre services fall into Scope 3, and we’ve been working on providing transparent sustainability data for some time. Although the net operational emission from our data centres is zero, customers need gross emissions data for their reporting since we are powered by 100% renewable electricity.
Our ambition is to develop a solution in the contact centre sustainability space that captures the data and measurements necessary for visibility.
We’re providing a monitoring and reporting mechanism for our cloud-based contact centre services hosted in BT private data centres. Independent third parties will be able to verify this, making it easy for our customers to validate their sustainability progress.
Key partnerships accelerated our progress
Our customers told us credibility is important, so we sought an academic partner to help us build a methodology that offered organisations an objective, standardised, and auditable measurement of total carbon emissions across their private data centre estate.
The Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands had published innovative work on the matter. They recognised that consumers of cloud-based IT services cannot access their suppliers’ data centre operations or understand their total energy consumption. Their experience in this area made it an ideal partner.
Our other partner, QiO, brought expertise in optimising industrial asset performance to achieve net zero emissions. QiO joined the project to build out the pilot work of the University of Groningen into a more widely applicable model.
Our joint project was in three phases:
1. Creating a prototype
Initially, we developed a first draft of a monitoring and visualisation system capable of measuring the carbon footprint of privately hosted services in our data centres. Using a data centre in the Netherlands as our prototype, we identified all the factors and variables that could affect energy consumption there.
But there were limitations, mainly focused on missing data points, such as the power consumption of data centre lighting, cooling and airflow for data centres we don’t own. Plus, our methodology relied on manual data gathering, which meant we could only provide a monthly report instead of one in real time.
2. Consolidating and automating the model
In our second development phase, we explored how to accurately estimate the missing data, and how to automate the process across other data centres.
The University of Groningen created an imputation methodology that accurately represented missing data, so our model could give a complete picture of energy use.
QiO joined the project to help us expand our model by connecting all our servers and data centres, ensuring it could work for data centres around the globe. It also automated the data collection process, opening the door to offering a real-time view of energy consumption.
3. Creating an effective sustainability tool
Our ultimate goal is enabling our customers to combine all their emissions data into a single reporting measurement. To help with this, we aligned our methodology with the GHG Corporate Protocol Standard to make consolidating data easy, and a foundation of rigorous academic research.
We continue to work on expanding our capabilities so we’ll be able to measure public cloud offerings as well. This is important in a multi-cloud world, mainly since research shows that moving core infrastructure into the public cloud can create energy efficiency savings of up to 93% – making cloud contact centres, for example, potentially more sustainable than on-premises operations.
