Our Publications

Knowledge sharing and transparency are at the heart of our organization. Access our latest vision, research, policy and white papers, reports, announcements, press releases and articles.

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Comments on EU Delegated Act for a common reporting scheme to rate the sustainability of data centres in the EU

The Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA) provides comprehensive feedback on the European Union's Delegated Act for a common Union rating scheme for data centers. Emphasizing the need for holistic indicators that span resource inputs to IT equipment and network traffic impacts, SDIA advocates for earlier reporting deadlines to monitor infrastructure growth effectively. The Alliance calls for greater transparency, advocating for the public release of detailed environmental performance data to foster accountability, enable civil society research, and support sustainable digital economy development. Through its suggestions, SDIA aims to strengthen the draft in alignment with EU goals for sustainability and transparency.

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Position Paper

Green Software Position Paper: Transparency, Standards, Market-Making

This comprehensive Position Paper from the SDIA Green Coding Summit provides a detailed exploration of the environmental impact of software development. It identifies key challenges such as lack of visibility into software's environmental costs, the need for standardized definitions and measurements, and the limited market for Green Software.

The paper defines "Green Software" and elaborates on the disciplines required for its development, including Green Coding, Green Requirements Engineering, and Green Operations. It also discusses the importance of distinguishing environmental impact from carbon emissions, and outlines strategies for raising awareness, setting standards, and increasing demand for Green Software.

Additionally, it presents political demands to support sustainable software practices, making it a must-read for industry professionals, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of technology and sustainability. Download the full PDF to explore how the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance is leading the charge in creating a more sustainable digital future.

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Position Paper

Public Cloud Providers: How and why to regulate digital resource utility companies

This document outlines the challenges and potential opportunities for creating a fair and equitable cloud infrastructure market. To understand the cloud market, its business models and infrastructure, it is helpful to compare it to another critical infrastructure sector – the energy sector. The similarities are striking. We can apply many of the regulatory and policy lessons-learned from the development of the energy sector to the cloud infrastructure industry, as the economic issues are so similar.

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List of impact indicators for software

An overview of relevant impact metrics - environmental, resource usage, waste and output flow based on the EN15804 +A2 standard for life cycle assessments in the construction sector.

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Whitepaper

Creating a digital environmental footprint: a Life Cycle Assessment approach

With the Digital Environmental Footprint as the first activity on the Roadmap of the SDIA, we aim to bring together experts and make fruitful connections to develop an open methodology to assess the digital environmental footprint of digital products and services.

We have chosen to build on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, since the information revealed through performing an assessment can give us what we need to report on our environmental impact, improving digital products and services, and therefore our businesses.

Read our article on this paper on our blog.

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Research Paper

Retrofitting of an air-cooled data center for energy efficiency

Small-scale data centers suffering from low cooling efficiency consume an intense power for reliable operation of IT equipment. In this study, thermal distribution in an air-cooled data center is simulated using an open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model to examine the underlying mechanism that reduces thermal and cooling efficiencies. The numerical model is validated with the temperature measurements conducted in the data center.

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The Utility of the Future Report

Both energy and digitalization are on everybody's minds today. Both play increasingly important roles in our daily lives, yet few realise how interdependent these industries truly are. Digitalization promises to re-align our economy around data and computation, but the digital economy of tomorrow will be built on the shoulders of today’s electrical infrastructure. Fewer still can see the tremendous industrial and societal opportunities when two fundamental requirements of the digital age integrate.

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