A week after the Data Centre climate change agreement (CCA) came into force industry experts have given DatacenterDynamics FOCUS their verdict: It’s a good start, but not enough.

The Data Centre CCA came into force on 1st July 2014. Under its terms UK data center businesses providing colocation space (both wholesale and retail) are eligible for a tax concession. A facility will be classed as colocation if it houses third party computing assets but space used to house servers that provide corporate IT function for the operator are ineligible.

Emma Fryer, associate director of the climate change programme for IT industry body Tech UK, who spent four years working on the negotiated agreement on behalf of the data centre industry, said the feedback from the industry has been encouraging.

“People look at carbon in a different way now" she said. OK there has been a marginal impact on investment, so far, but the signal this sends out is more important,” said Fryer.

The impression of stability that the CCA sends out will have a much greater impact, according to Fryer. “Investors like stability. Everyone knows where they stand now and where they will be in ten year’s time. This is likely to have a much longer impact on growth" she said.

“The CCA is an important milestone for the UK Data Centre Sector because it is more than a tax concession, it is a formal recognition by government that the data centre sector exists and will be here for the foreseeable future,” said Fryer.

Peter Hopton, CEO of Iceotope and inventor of liquid cooling techniques, hailed the Climate Change Agreement as a step in the right direction, but said more needs to be done to refine it.

“My biggest concern is that the agreement uses PUE (power use effectiveness) as its primary stat for defining energy efficiency, which can be somewhat misleading,” said Hopton.

“PUE doesn’t take into account internal fans, which can actually consume a lot of power. It means that data centre vendors and operators can manipulate the stats,” said Hopton, who argued that this is often ‘rendering hollow figures’.

“Schemes like the Climate Change Agreement are proof that the data centre industry has recognised to the emissions problem. The most important task for data centre operators now is using the best emerging energy efficiency technologies,” said Hopton.

Rob Elder, director of data center design specialist Keysource, has called for a new metric for measuring energy efficiency. “As PUE data can be misleading, Keysource has developed its approach to focus on total facility kilowatt hours,” said Elder.

Tech UK’s Fryer agreed that more needs to be done but said this is a work in progress. “In the future, energy stewardship will be the key objective,” said Fryer.