Connect(X) 2021 Coverage
The big challenge for the telecom sector in the next decade will be reducing the carbon footprint, Marc Ganzi, President and CEO of DigitalBridge, said during an interview with Jonathan Adelstein, President and CEO of the Wireless Infrastructure Association, yesterday at the Connectivity Expo in Orlando.
“I think the [tower] sector is generally neutral and negative from a carbon footprint perspective,” he said. “However, particularly in the data center sector, we spend a lot of power, and that power isn’t terribly clean.”
Global warming has become an existential threat, according to Ganzi, and CEOs of digital companies need to provide a platform for change, as it relates to climate change, Ganzi said. “You can’t argue with science; you can’t argue with math,” he said. “If you look at the rapid change of what’s happened in the last 10 years, the planet has gotten one degree warmer. That’s not good. That’s really bad.”
DigitalBridge portfolio company Vertical Bridge has already gone carbon neutral. Ganzi said the industry as a whole has a responsibility to create infrastructure that is sustainable, creating renewable sources of power adjacent to that infrastructure. He urged the industry to begin a dialogue on ways to make it happen.
Carbon neutrality may have an impact on the bottom line. Ganzi talked about one of his portfolio companies, a data center in Brazil, which opted to use hydro energy two years ago. The cost of that power was about 18 percent more expensive. “We made the decision to make that company 100 percent green from day one, accepting that our returns were going to go down,” he said.
Ganzi and company have been discussing environmentally sustainable growth for a while, and they have decided that now is the time to do something about it, both at the parent company level and at the public company level. To do this, DigitalBridge will take advantage of its relationships with global pension funds that are putting a high priority on getting to a carbon neutral world.
“There are sources of capital out there that are willing to take on a lower IRR [internal rate of return] profile just to see that the planet moves in the right direction,” he said. “My challenge is to figure out the right business models. I’ve got to figure out the way we do it. Is it solar? Is it hydro? Is it wind farming?”
Ganzi talked about a large utility company in northern Texas, where they are looking at doing 100 percent renewable energy in a Bitcoin mining data center campus. “Bitcoin mining is horrible because it consumes more power than any type of server in a data center,” he said. “We’ve got to be more creative. We’ve got to push the envelope a little bit to make them carbon neutral.”
Step changes in wireless technology provide possibilities for positive change, Ganzi noted. For example, 5G technology has much lower emissions, because the distance between the antenna and the devices is shorter. The devices consume less power, as well. Additionally, IoT creates more efficient industrial and manufacturing facilities.
“There’s opportunity here, there’s a lot of opportunity for us to do better,” Ganzi said. “I think that one of my charges over the next decade is to really deliver on that promise. We’re on the clock. We’ve got a little over eight years to get it done but, you know, we’ll figure it out and it’ll take a lot of people in this room to help us figure it out.”
By J. Sharpe Smith Inside Towers Technology Editor
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