As an IT and business consulting services provider, data centers are a key way we help our clients deliver greater business value. They also represent nearly half of our overall energy consumption. Maximizing renewable electricity at these facilities is critical to protecting the environment and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Ensuring energy-efficient data centers
Our main data centers are compliant with best-in-class standards outlined by the Uptime Institute. We are also a member of The Green Grid, a global consortium of leaders promoting energy efficient data centers. Through this collaboration we use innovative, green, and renewable energy resources to significantly reduce our energy consumption and carbon emissions and utilize techniques such as server virtualization and consolidation, lighting control, and cooling retrofits. Over the long term, we also intend to eliminate diesel in our backup power systems
Achieving 100% renewable electricity at our largest data center in Phoenix, U.S.
In 2021, we hit a milestone: 70% of the electricity consumed by our data centers came from renewable sources. This milestone was made possible by achieving maximum renewable electricity use at data centers in the UK, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and, most recently, Phoenix, Arizona. Our Phoenix facility is the largest CGI-owned enterprise data center. Due to the facility’s large size, this shift resulted in a 47% decrease in emissions across all our data centers.
On track to achieve 100% renewable electricity in all our data centers by 2023
Following our accomplishment in Phoenix, we are now focused on maximizing renewable electricity use at all our data centers across the world. We believe, one of the ways to achieve our goal is by developing innovative partnerships. For example, we teamed up with Green Edge Compute AS in Norway to build sustainable, secure, efficient data centers that use water cooling.
Our continuous efforts to increase renewable usage and implement electricity efficiency dramatically reduced our energy consumption and carbon emissions from data centers by 50% compared to our F2014 baseline emissions. Because of this progress we are on track to achieve 100% renewable electricity in all our data centers by 2023.
