q.beyond AG stands out as one of the first medium-sized IT service providers in Germany to align with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency. This Code encompasses a set of best practises aimed at enhancing energy efficiency within data centres. By taking this initiative, the company reaffirms its dedication to Green IT and sustainability.
IT service provider is striving to achieve complete climate neutrality across all its business operations by the year 2025. q.beyond already operates its data centres on a climate-neutral basis by drawing on green electricity and offsetting unavoidable residual emissions (Scope 3).
“Consistently implementing the EU Code requirements is creating a genuine ‘win-win’ situation for us. As energy expenses rise, greater energy efficiency helps to stabilise our costs”, comments Thies Rixen, CEO of q.beyond AG. “What’s more, initiatives of this nature place us even more firmly in the focus of SME companies wishing to procure sustainable IT services in order to meet their own sustainability targets. And that directly benefits the enhanced go-to-market approach with which we aim to boost the effectiveness of our sales activities.”
The EU has set itself the target of making European data centres climate neutral, highly energy efficient and sustainable by 2030. It is promoting achievement of this goal with new and existing regulations which require greater use of renewable energy sources and extensive energy efficiency measures in data centres. One core instrument of these efforts is the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency.
As a sector-wide self-regulatory initiative, the Code has the objective of reducing energy consumption at data centres in Europe, and thus their environmental impact, without comprising their performance capacity. Signatories like q.beyond commit to implementing the total of around 150 recommendations set out in the Code at their data centres and reporting their implementation status to the EU Commission each year. “From enhancing cooling technology, deploying virtualisation technologies and energy management systems through to integrating renewable energies sources, we have advanced numerous aspects of our approach in recent months in order to gradually improve efficiency at our high-security data centres”, explains Martina Altheim, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at q.beyond AG.
The European Commission has also launched political and financial initiatives to promote energy efficiency at data centres. These include the EU Taxonomy, a mandatory system for uniformly classifying ‘green’ economic activities in the EU. This legislation also has one section referring specifically to data centres. To satisfy EU Taxonomy criteria requirements, sustainable data centre operations must therefore comply with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency. In addition, the use of climate-friendly cooling agents, known as low-GWP refrigerants, is required in cooling systems. Here too, q.beyond has already made great progress: In refurbishing its cooling technology, the IT service provider will deploy refrigerants of this kind with low greenhouse gas potential from next year onwards.
