Our Path to Renewable Energy Through Customer Partnerships

Our renewable energy strategy’s primary goal is to meet our climate neutral by 2030 target. To meet this target, we first start with increasing the efficiency of our support equipment (supplying power and cooling to our customers’ equipment), but this is usually a fifth to a third of the total power at a facility. The larger share of the energy is the electricity we deliver to our customers' IT equipment like servers so that they can provide their services. For this portion of the facility energy, we cannot control efficiency (our customers take care of that), but we can choose to deliver low-carbon, renewable electricity.

We follow a renewable electricity procurement hierarchy to help determine energy origination and purchases, prioritizing projects that are additional (the project would not have happened otherwise), regional (contributing to the same grid where the electricity is used), and bundled (where delivery of power remains “bundled” to renewable energy certificates).

Some of our customers are also procuring renewable electricity to cover their server activity in our facilities. CyrusOne is fortunate to have customers with ambitious climate goals – a few of our customers have even reached carbon neutrality and/or are operating on 100% renewable electricity. This has not only supported our own climate goals but has also motivated us to keep improving so that we can support our customers and maintain productive partnerships. In greenhouse gas accounting, it is ambiguous whether colocation data center operators or our customers (or both) should be responsible for reporting server and support electricity as Scope 2 emissions. To make sure nothing “falls through the cracks” we account for these emissions in our own greenhouse gas inventory (Scope 2) because we consider the electricity to be part of the service we provide to our customers. However, some customers also take responsibility for the same electricity emissions because they have operational control over the servers, and thus include them in their greenhouse gas inventory (also as Scope 2). Although this may seem redundant (and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol realizes this possibility), we would rather these emissions show up in two greenhouse gas inventories, rather than risk them being in none.

For the first time in 2021 we measured the renewable electricity we confirmed was procured by customers to cover their servers and support electricity in our facilities. While we do not take credit for our customers’ efforts, it is important to provide an accurate accounting of our greenhouse gas inventory. Importantly, this is not applying the same REC (or equivalent) to two different megawatt-hours – it is recognizing the same megawatt-hour (covered by a REC) in two different inventories. Additionally, if our customers are already procuring renewable electricity to cover their server electricity in our facilities, it allows us to concentrate our efforts elsewhere on replacing non-renewable electricity or to seek out higher-quality renewable electricity that meets more of our desired attributes. The table below reports 1) renewables procured by CyrusOne, 2) customer-procured renewables (renewable electricity we have confirmed was procured by our customers for their server electricity and cooling in our facilities), and 3) unbundled renewable certificate procurement (which we currently don’t employ). The categories are summed together to equal the percentage of our total electricity that comes from renewable sources. We’re happy to report that this has all been through third-party assurance to confirm methods and sources.

Ultimately, sustainability is a team sport and our mission is to be strategic partners with our customers to move their sustainability goals forward. We look forward to closing the remaining gap with more and better renewables in the future.