Carbon Accounting: The GHG Protocol and the Three Scopes
Carbon accounting sounds like something for the sustainability department, but for infrastructure at this scale it has become a siting and disclosure constraint with teeth. The framework the whole world uses, the GHG Protocol, sorts a company's emissions into three buckets called scopes, and understanding those buckets is now table stakes for anyone financing, permitting, or defending a data center. Get comfortable here. The vocabulary of scopes is the vocabulary in which regulators, investors, and customers will increasingly interrogate your project, and 'we buy renewable energy' is an answer that gets sharper follow-up questions every year.
Knowledge check
In the GHG Protocol, what is the difference between Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions for a data center operator?
Show the answer
Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating, or cooling that the operator consumes; for a data center this is dominated by grid electricity and is usually the largest operational category. Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions in the value chain that the operator does not own or directly control, such as the embodied carbon in servers and construction, and upstream fuel production. Scope 2 is bought energy; Scope 3 is everything else up and down the value chain.