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Dropbox reaches fully renewable data centre power

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Dropbox reaches fully renewable data centre power

A step towards the company's goal of full carbon neutrality by 2030

Dropbox has shared more details on its sustainability plans, announcing that it now uses fully reneawable electricity to power its data centre servers.

The cloud storage giant plans to be carbon neutral by 2030, and the use of full renewables is an important step towards that goal.

In an update released yesterday, the company said it was making progress towards its aim of achieving carbon neutrality for its Scope 1 and Scope 2 direct emissions, as well as its indirect Scope 3 emissions from business travel.

'As a company that runs on data centres, we recognise the impact we have on global energy consumption, and we're proud to announce that all of our data centre storage server power is covered by 100 per cent renewable electricity,' it said. 'This means when you're storing your data with us, you're not leaving a carbon footprint.'

Dropbox said it achieved its 100 per cent renewable target by focusing on three areas: maintaining best-in-class power usage effectiveness; optimising overall power consumption; and sourcing more renewable energy.

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is an efficiency metric that tracks how efficiently a data centre operator is leveraging the power it consumes. Its use to compare data centres against each other has been criticised, however as it was always intended as an improvement metric for a company to rate its own progress, not a comparative one.

That hasn't stopped Dropbox from celebrating its 'top of the class' PUE rating. It said, '[B]y 2020, we were operating at 17 per cent below the industry average. We achieved this by implementing outside air economisation and thermal containment solutions and by maximising power utilisation throughout our spaces.'

The company also pointed to the business benefit of achieving its target, citing the Edelman 2021 Trust Barometer, which found that customers are more likely to trust companies that embrace sustainable practices (although only by 5.7 per cent).

Dropbox also said it is investing in technologies to automatically power down servers when not in use, which saves an estimated five per cent in power use over each server's lifespan.

The company is also working on driving down power consumption when a server is idle, which could yield energy savings of a further 50 per cent.

'In the last year and a half, we've reduced our data centre carbon footprint by 15 percent. In the coming years, we'll continue to find smart, innovative ways to cut back and reach our overall sustainability goals by 2030,' the company said.

In the post the firm also revealed an eye-catching method of driving employee engagement for its sustainability goals that sees it encourage staff to use volunteer time for environmental causes. Dropbox employees are entitled to 32 hours paid time off each year to work for a cause close to their hearts.

We live in a time of unprecedented change. Extreme weather is ravaging the world, disrupting lives and collapsing supply chains. It's never been more important for everyone step up and do their part for the planet, so join us on the 14th October for Computing 's first ever Tech Impact event. We'll be talking about the importance of change, while also acknowledging its difficulty - and sharing success stories and advice from those who've been there and done that. Register now.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Business Green.

Dropbox reaches fully renewable data centre power

A step towards the company's goal of full carbon neutrality by 2030

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