Empowering Sustainable Data Center Design with Microsoft’s Open Source Cloud LCA Tool

As the data center industry increasingly focuses on sustainability, understanding the environmental trade-offs of siting, design, and operational decisions is more important than ever. In this session, we will explore the Cloud LCA Tool, an open-source life cycle assessment platform published by Microsoft and WSP in Nature. This tool enables stakeholders to evaluate both embodied and operational carbon impacts as well as water consumption across diverse infrastructure configurations. 

We will showcase the Cloud LCA Tool's capability to model and compare sustainability outcomes for the OCP community. During the presentation, we will demonstrate how the LCA tool can be used to support decision making related to datacenter development and operations by evaluating four scenarios.

Speaker Bio:

Teresa Nick, Microsoft’s Director of Natural Systems & Sustainability, investigates datacenter environmental impacts and innovates low-energy networks. Her previous role as Director of Sustainability Information Management saw her spearheading datacenter sustainability analytics. Teresa’s academic journey includes a Neuroscience PhD from Yale, a Caltech postdoc, and academic tenure at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

At Microsoft, Medtronic, and McKinsey, she’s led transformative innovation programs, promoting eco-positive business practices. Teresa’s accolades include the iM100 Award from Infrastructure Masons in 2023 for driving data center sustainability and contributions to the NSF’s CIVIC Climate program as a review panelist. Her expertise spans IoT, wearables, real-time algorithms, and photonic networks, with 15+ patents, 20+ scientific papers, and 15+ digital certifications like CISSP and PMP. Her work in sustainable networks and datacenters reflects her dedication to eco-friendly innovation.