Sustainability in Data Centers is Seeing Short-Term Setbacks
Interview with Miranda Gardiner of iMasons Climate Accord, Wannie Park of PADO (LG Nova), Nabeel Mahmood and Phillip Koblence of Nomad Futurist
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A widening gap is developing between the data center industry's stated sustainability ambitions and the harsh operational reality of an AI-driven power grab, say four digital infrastructure veterans.
This episode of Cool Vector includes commentary from Miranda Gardiner, Executive Director of the iMasons Climate Accord, Wannie Park, CEO of PADO (an LG Nova-backed company), Nabeel Mahmood, data center executive and Co-Founder of Nomad Futurist and Phillip Koblence, data center executive and Co-Founder of Nomad Futurist. The conversation is moderated by host David Snow.
The challenge facing the digital infrastructure industry and its stated quest to become low-carbon is summed up by a sentiment Koblence says is being expressed behind closed doors: "Get me power now - I don't care how it's made."
Gardiner's organization, iMasons Climate Accord, is a nonprofit industry initiative — born out of the Infrastructure Masons trade association — that brings together over a hundred digital infrastructure companies to collaborate on reducing Scope 3 emissions across materials, equipment, power, and increasingly water.
PADO is a company born out of LG Nova that helps data centers more efficiently use power.
Among the key takeaways from this Cool Vector conversation:
• The AI buildout has created such acute power demand that operators are quietly abandoning near-term sustainability commitments for natural gas bridge solutions.
• Water sustainability in data centers is a growing concern. Water consumption driven by evaporative cooling is now triggering permit rejections and community opposition in water-stressed regions, and hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have all disclosed that their water usage increased significantly during the AI scaling surge — in some cases reversing years of efficiency gains.
• Inefficient data centers are "emissions machines." With average server utilization rates historically in the 10–20% range, the industry's fastest near-term sustainability lever may not be cleaner power at all, but doing far more with the power already being consumed — which is exactly the workload optimization and right-sizing agenda Nabeel Mahmood is pushing.
• Community acceptance has become a hard constraint on data center development. The sector has spent years optimizing internal metrics like PUE and WUE while failing to build the public legitimacy it now needs to keep growing — and as local governments increasingly block permits over electricity bills, water fears, and skepticism about promised benefits, that communications gap is becoming a business risk.
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Cool Vector: Hello and welcome to Cool Vector. I’m David Snow, your host, and today we’re joined by Wannie Park, CEO of Pado, which is an LG Nova-backed company; Miranda Gardiner, Executive Director of iMason’s Climate Accord; Philip Koblence, longtime data center executive and co-founder of Nomad Futurist; and Nabeel Mahmood, longtime data center executive and co-founder of Nomad Futurist. Everybody, welcome to Cool Vector. Great to see you — thanks for joining. We’re talking about a very big and important topic: sustainability in digital infrastructure. Miranda, why don’t we start with you. Do you mind giving us a quick overview of your accord — where it came from and what its goals are?
Miranda Gardiner: The iMasons Climate Accord is the largest initiative that has come out of Infrastructure Masons as a whole. Infrastructure Masons is a decade-old trade association, a nonprofit that focuses on key industry challenges in digital infrastructure. The Climate Accord was launched almost four years ago, thanks to the advisory council taking note of their responsibility when it came to resource use and sustainability as a whole — what could they do to have more impact? The Climate Accord was born with a lens of Scope 3 emissions: materials, equipment, and power. It has since evolved and expanded a bit more this year. We’re really excited to throw water into that mix — what’s going on with Scope 3 and water, the energy-water nexus, and so on. It came really out of a place of understanding the responsibility that this industry has to a sustained future. It’s one thing to have data centers making our lives easier, better, faster, more efficient. It’s also a key element in sustainability. We want our lives to be better and more efficient, so how do we marry these two things? It comes from a lot of collaboration between the hundred-plus companies that sit within the Climate Accord.
Cool Vector: Wannie, you’re at the helm of Pado, which is directly relevant to sustainability in digital infrastructure — specifically energy and the grid. Please give us an overview of your company, how it came together, and who you’ve partnered with.
Wannie Park: Myself and my team are very much energy SaaS people. We sit under LG Electronics — we’re a majority-owned subsidiary. We spun out back in May, so we are independent, which also means we’re not exclusive to LG hardware or anything like that. What we do is orchestrate the white space and the gray space. A lot of that is storage, a lot of that is cooling, and actually understanding and having better insight into workload management — finding ways to synthetically improve performance without having to access more power, without companies or data centers writing giant checks.
Cool Vector: Nabeel, you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about sustainability in data centers and digital infrastructure — the need to do better. As you look across data center land, where are we as far as going towards a carbon-free future, and what impediments are in the way?
Nabeel Mahmood: We have made real progress. Cooling is getting smarter, power procurement is much more sophisticated, and the best operators are treating sustainability like an engineering problem — not a marketing problem anymore. But the pace is being tested right now. The AI surge is creating an availability crisis where speed to power and speed to market have started to beat long-term optimization strategies. Sustainability is no longer a side conversation — it’s now a constraint. If you can’t show credible plans around power, water, carbon, and community acceptance, projects are going to be delayed or killed.
Cool Vector: Phil, you are in touch with many executives. Everybody is saying publicly that they support sustainability — maybe they have some stated green goals that came out a few years ago. What are people saying privately right now across the data center industry?
Phil Koblence: What they’re saying privately is: get me power now. I don’t care how it’s made. And I think ultimately that’s the problem. When you’re in a race — and we’re in this AI race — the problem becomes how do you get power quickly? And inevitably what we have looked at as an industry, as a bridge to eventual power, has largely been natural gas and natural gas turbines, which has not done a favor for our industry. I operated two facilities in the New York metro area during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The requirement for any of us that had generators was ultra-low sulfur diesel. In New York City we were without power for nine days, and out in Jersey we were without commercial power for thirteen days. Within 48 hours, the requirements for ultra-low sulfur diesel were gone, and we were being delivered five-dollar-a-gallon heating oil with every generator in the New York metro area putting brown smoke into the air — because inevitably, uptime and power demand will always trump environmental desires. That being said, I have always said this: the digital infrastructure industry is one of the rare industries where there is an economic incentive to operate as efficiently as possible. You may have to sacrifice some of those desires in the short term in order to keep pace with demand, as long as you can keep your eye on the ball and make sure the bandaid doesn’t become the permanent solution — that the bridge doesn’t become the ultimate power distribution methodology. What Miranda is doing, and all of the partners of the Infrastructure Masons Climate Accord, is really trying to build the longer-term infrastructure to be as sustainable as possible, because it’s both in the economic interests of digital infrastructure companies and in our collective interests as stewards of the environment.
Cool Vector: If you were to rank the activities that make up a data center by their contribution to carbon, how would they rank? How do you think about the culprits and how to prioritize addressing them?
Miranda Gardiner: Energy and power — top of the food chain right now. But to me that hasn’t changed. I’ve been in sustainability 20-plus years. If you look at the LEED rating system, the bulk of points come from energy. That said, when you see news coming out now of data center permits being rejected — there was one just recently in Virginia — it’s due to water concerns, so that is now rising to the forefront, hence why we’re taking on water. And then if you look at any developer, any building, Scope 3 in your built environment is critical: what’s going on with concrete, what’s going on with steel, the recyclability in those production mechanisms. We’ve also seen Microsoft come out with their Community First initiative, and announcements on the AI-water nexus from Amazon most recently. They are taking this seriously, and they are also, I would argue, being honest in their reporting. If you look at some of those sustainability reports from recent years, they have said: we are not hitting our targets, we are missing the mark and increasing our emissions. That wasn’t something we saw ten years ago — it was ‘everyone’s doing great.’ Now there’s a reckoning of ‘we’ve got to do better, and we’re willing to do better.’
Nabeel Mahmood: The ranking in my world would be power source and demand response — that’s the biggest thing that needs to be on the forefront. The next thing would be IT growth and utilization. If you’ve got an empty data center running, it’s basically an emissions machine. Are we looking at utilization and efficiency ratios? Are we right-sizing? Are we doing the right workload placements in those environments? Clean power is a starting point. Better utilization, having the right metrics, having operational strategies we can measure — where are we today, and what’s our process for getting better tomorrow?
Phil Koblence: The circle we need to square is this: we can be as outwardly transparent as we want by publishing PUEs and WUEs and all these things, but ultimately that doesn’t translate to people’s kitchen tables. When you have communities that are inherently skeptical of digital infrastructure development, local governments pushing back against allowing development — you can give them a PUE of one, the best water usage effectiveness, tell them you’re carbon neutral, and they don’t care because they see their power bills going up. We as an industry need to do a better job of translating from the language we speak internally to what actually matters to the kitchen tables of people who are not living in this industry day in and day out.
Cool Vector: Is there any pushback to standards for measurement or reporting — because the reporting is viewed as cumbersome, expensive, not relevant? Perhaps everyone can agree that sustainability is good and we all have our plan for becoming more efficient, but these requirements and reporting expectations that are put on us — we don’t like them.
Miranda Gardiner: Absolutely. Just look back to 2022, 2023, when big companies in our space started to pull back from their SBTi targets. This is just on repeat. People didn’t want to do LEED when it first came out. It does become a challenge. I’d like to see that friction. If everyone just did this voluntarily, I’d be out of a job — which would be great. I would love to see that sometime in the future: that sustainability is just a given. But that’s not how this works. It’s there as a back-and-forth, and it’s a good back-and-forth, because we get better doing that.
Phil Koblence: Let the record show that Miranda is looking forward to retirement.
Cool Vector: When Miranda retires, that means we’ve reached zero emissions.
Miranda Gardiner: Amazing.
Nabeel Mahmood: The topic of standardization and metrics is very interesting. We are making progress, but we’re not where we need to be. There are a few things that need to be addressed — boundary problems, for one. Scope 1, 2, and 3 can get messy fast depending on whether you’re talking colocation, enterprise, cloud, or managed services. Then there’s data quality and consistency — we lack uniformity. There are still organizations capturing all of this on spreadsheets. Even definitions like IT load versus facility load vary within the same domain. You can have two identical sites that will have totally different carbon outcomes depending on who’s running them.
Cool Vector: Is the trend towards behind-the-meter energy good or bad for sustainability? The main reason many people are building behind the meter is because they want independent power sources and not to be reliant on the grid. Does that make the sustainability challenge greater?
Wannie Park: This is all about addressing time to power — grow at all costs. It’s anti-flexibility. We have partners like Schneider and Siemens doing massive gas turbines, and we do a lot of work in West Virginia where the land isn’t really available to connect to the grid, so there’s a lot of behind-the-meter activity. But from a sustainability perspective, it’s pretty binary to me: it’s gas. Not sustainable. Fossil fuel. And we’re not talking about little baby projects — we’re talking massive deployments all over the country as soon as possible. Can you actually dig yourself out of that hole at some point from a sustainability lens? Probably not — at least not in the next five to ten years. That’s a massive negative impact.
Miranda Gardiner: If you’re going to do behind the meter and it’s going to be low-carbon solutions, why wouldn’t we? This helps with a grid that is already over capacity. That said, if behind the meter is just burning a bunch of diesel, that’s not great from a sustainability lens.
Phil Koblence: Whether it’s natural gas or hydrogen — which is interesting as a byproduct of water — you have a lot of innovation happening on the nuclear side with small modular reactors and microreactors, and Amazon and Meta are paying millions to restart abandoned nuclear facilities. I feel like behind the meter inherently allows you to reduce the issue to a smaller footprint, and as a consequence you have more flexibility to do things sustainably.
Nabeel Mahmood: I think we’re all in agreement: behind the meter is the only way forward as it stands today, given the resource limitations in our current grid. As long as we are transparent, measuring all the data points, reporting correctly, and holding ourselves accountable, it works. It truly is a bridge. The danger is turning that bridge into a destination. We’ve got to be honest and transparent through that process.
Wannie Park: The upfront CapEx to do this behind the meter is so massive that you can’t just toggle back and forth. Once you’re in, you’re in. The numbers are massive regardless of the source — whether it’s an SMR or gas, these are slow-moving boats.
Cool Vector: Walk us through a sequence of positive events leading to a future closer to sustainability. What could go right in the industry and in the coordination between participants to get us where we need to go?
Miranda Gardiner: I love this question. Seeing the number of companies realize they can’t do this alone — and that they’re working with their peers and competitors within the Climate Accord — I think that’s one thing. You look at something like our call to action on environmental product declarations: the four big hyperscalers in the room, Schneider Electric, and Digital Realty all signing off on a letter like that. Those kinds of market signals are a first piece of this. The second piece is continuing to evolve our definition of a data center. Yes, hyperscale facilities are key, but there are also data centers in the middle of Midtown Manhattan — and that should just be part of this, that there are varying levels of data centers going forward. They don’t all need to be one size fits all, because that allows communities to embrace data centers right in their own streets. It also allows for more reuse and brownfield development, and for different workloads that need different kinds of technology. It doesn’t all have to be blanketed one way. I think that’ll also help us cut back on some of the redundancy we see right now. The last piece is that as users, we also have to be mindful — we are driving some of this growth too.
Cool Vector: Nabeel, why should there be cause for optimism?
Nabeel Mahmood: The sector we’re in is a bunch of builders and engineers. We’re seeing a lot of innovation from chips to thermal management. I think the most important thing is if we can start eating our own dog food and improving on utilization and efficiency ratios within the space — if you’re able to do that, we can generate more compute in smaller footprints and start using cleaner power. The most important thing is accountability and ensuring we have all the data points and create standards that could be as simple as measuring how fast a car goes and what the miles per gallon of a vehicle is. If we are able to deploy and capture that, that would make people bullish and optimistic about the future of compute.
Cool Vector: Wannie, as you’re speaking to customers and potential customers, can you characterize their level of enthusiasm for greater sustainability? Do they care?
Wannie Park: They don’t — I’m going to be blunt. I think they don’t, but I also think it’s because it doesn’t pencil out right now. It’s all a growth mindset. That said, maybe shifting to something more optimistic: customers are actually getting excited about energy decoupling — data centers, the gray space and the white space, all the data and information and underutilization of assets. When you start decoupling that and actually using AI for the purposes of serving AI to create a better solution, they do get excited about that, because what you’re doing is talking their language: increasing tokens per square foot per hour, or revenue per square foot per hour. A lot of that is really dictated by cooling, by water, by the new chips coming out that are a lot more efficient. I’m also excited about larger companies making investments and talking about sustainability as a service — companies like Ecolab are very big into water and health, saying we have a play here, and it’s a business model. These things are pretty early, but the right people are driving it and there’s passion behind it. Hopefully we can turn it into a real product.
Cool Vector: Phil, any final thoughts?
Phil Koblence: I will quote Hamilton by saying: look around, look around — do you know how lucky we are to be alive right now? We’re in this crazy, breakneck technology age. When you’re in the bubble, you tend to look at all of the things that are wrong. But if you think of how much more efficient we are operating than we were at the start of my career thirty years ago — and as we start leveraging AI and data from around the planet, we will eventually get to the point where we deploy workloads where they make the most sense, not necessarily where we can grab as much power as possible. That doesn’t necessarily make the most ecological sense, but we are at the beginning of this journey and not the end — notwithstanding Miranda’s desire to retire.
Cool Vector: I’d like to give a huge thank you to Miranda Gardiner from the iMasons Climate Accord, Wannie Park from Pado, an LG Nova-backed company, Nabeel Mahmood from Nomad Futurist, and Philip Koblence from Nomad Futurist. Thanks everybody and see you next time.
