As the economic and community impacts of climate change become clearer, organisations are looking for strategic, complexity-free ways to drive their operations towards a net-zero carbon emissions position.
With more than $11.5 billion worth of major utility infrastructure under management, leading energy infrastructure company Jemena is on a roadmap to deliver on its net-zero ambition (for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions) by 2050.
Simultaneously, Jemena is transforming its operations, leveraging digital megatrends like cloud and AI to service quality improvement, automation and compliance agendas. This scaling of digital strategy and infrastructure comes with a rising carbon debt based on power consumed.
With its entire secondary infrastructure and direct cloud connectivity architecture co-located at NEXTDC’s M2 Melbourne facility, Jemena recently opted into NEXTDC’s NEXTneutral carbon offset program. It only took two clicks from within the ONEDC DCIM platform to achieve carbon neutrality for its entire footprint at M2, but the impact of embracing the Climate Active-certified service is significant.
Igor Jovanovic, Cloud Engineering Manager at Jemena, said there is a broader program of carbon reduction and accountability across the business and Digital wanted to make a strong contribution where possible
“NEXTDC’s carbon neutral data centre services and the ecosystem of clouds, carriers and solutions providers they host are co-located in highly energy-efficient facilities,” Jovanovic said. “Prior to NEXTneutral, the only way Digital could contribute to the broader sustainability initiative was to start turning systems off.
“Obviously, we can’t just do that as IT capability is central to the business.”
When seeking out data centre partners, NEXTDC was the only service provider offering the opportunity to mitigate the associated digital carbon footprint through a Commonwealth-accredited offset program.
“NEXTneutral is a low-cost and low-complexity method for Jemena to make genuine progress towards our net zero journey,” Jovanovic said. “It costs us less than a cup of coffee per month, per kilowatt of power used and all our energy consumption via NEXTDC PoPs is certified carbon neutral.
“It has allowed us to demonstrate to the broader business that Digital are doing our bit We have made a genuine contribution towards net zero with minimal effort.
“The importance of our IT partners in being able to report, contribute and provide flexibility in service offerings will play an increasingly important role on our journey towards our 2050 net zero ambitions.
“Interestingly, that plays out well for services companies that are also in the NEXTDC ecosystem with carbon neutral objectives and infrastructure of their own.”
Reach out to NEXTDC if you want to better understand how to reach carbon neutral IT status with minimal cost and effort.