Data Center Construction: Beyond Concrete and Steel

Stacy 0:58

For a data center, you start to get into all the air handling equipment, but also all the things that we are using to compute. So rack servers and the racks they sit in. The data is all over the place. The lead rating system had started to require disclosure of these emissions of how you make stuff through environmental product declarations or EPDs. So these EPDs were starting to proliferate and be published as PDF documents, electronics, ICT space, and as something that hadn't been well aggregated or provided in a place where you could understand who's disclosing emissions around those things so that you can quantify the impacts of those things. But it's a time and the scale that if you start really trying to wrap your head around, we need a small army of people working on this to really tackle it.

Ryan 2:13

And today's conversation is about something that all of us are constantly hearing about, especially right now, given the time. And that has to do with data centers. Everything we've talked about AI, we've talked about sort of how to utilize AI, but we haven't dug into data centers and we really haven't dug into the construction of them, but today focusing more on the sustainability side of data centers because data centers are not new. Data centers have been around for 20 plus years, 25 plus years, really post-dot-com era where we started kind of shifting from storing a lot of paper and getting into, you know, once the internet was created, all of these things of how we were going to store information all the way up through the cloud. So we have a history and we have a past around designing and building with data centers. And I wanted to have a conversation with someone who has really spent her career focusing on sustainability, but started as an architect and practicing or started working in architecture firms and practicing architecture, leaping in and doing work with a very large construction company focused on sustainability and supporting their creating uh tools and technology that would help us understand all of the materials that we utilize in the built environment. And today's guest is Stacy Smedley. She's the VP of Product Impact for ERG, Eastern Research Group. And she is based out of Seattle, Washington. And like I said, she's been in the AEC industry her entire career. And I came across her looking for someone who has really kind of zeroed in and focused on the data center side and understanding like, are we looking at the right information as it relates to sustainability for data centers? Because in the past, we weren't necessarily even wanting to design data centers in our profession. This has only really accelerated due to how many data centers we need to build and the fact that that's virtually all we're building today. It's what we hear about. It's like it's keeping people busy. It's it's allowing certain businesses to now suddenly grow to where other businesses were focused on other types of infrastructure. And some of the conversation is we'll we'll talk a little bit about the energy and some of the topics that are commonplace as it relates to data centers. But Stacy and the group there have really been studying things that we just we just didn't think about, or they just weren't part of our purview and within our contracts in the AEC to really be thinking about that. If if we think like the the sustainability issue driven by data centers is this, what happens when it's really this and we haven't even taken a look at it? Because if we're gonna talk about like the the impact of something that is accelerating at a rapid pace and wondering, like, okay, well, we're we just got to move fast and we can't be thinking about this. Like, what is the impact of the things that we didn't know about as we were designing and planning data centers? Stacey Smedley, welcome to Activating Curiosity.

Stacy 5:42

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Ryan 5:44

Yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation because this topic is in everybody's news feed. We've seen it everywhere. It you can't miss it because it's a big topic in politics right now. It's happening everywhere, it's not wanting to happen everywhere, and that's the construction of data centers. But we're going to take a little different view and topic. Look at this because you've been studying throughout your career sustainability, and you could kind of get into your past starting from architecture, leading yourself into really where everything around sustainability, you work for construction companies, architects, looks like the government, right? So you have a unique perspective to bring to this. But also like some of the work that you've been doing recently around data centers and the sustainability side of things that maybe we didn't think about. But before we get to today, if we could just take a step back, because I think you and I, we we started our careers maybe a little bit around the same time. But like I think back to like the dot-com area and where we started shifting from, you know, so much paper and getting into digital data centers, you know, this idea of building them is not new. Like we've been going through this for quite some time. And those are transitioning at the same time as we're really starting to see USGBC here in the States and other groups really taking a look at sustainability and certifications and things for for buildings, right? As you were working through your career, like and even thinking back towards how data centers have shifted from the materials they were using to the energy usage, because that has gone through its own evolution in the last 20 years until AI popped up, and to how we talk about data centers today. But just share a little bit about some of those things that you were focused on early in your career around sustainability and the build environment and kind of how, as you studied this today around data centers, like what did you learn from the past and those types of things?

Stacy 7:52

Sure. Happy to, yeah. I mean, I started on the architecture side of the equation, um, degree in architecture, thinking I was gonna design, you know, green buildings to save the world. And I, you know, I did that um for the first almost 10 years of my career. And that took me down the pathway of all the certifications that are related to buildings and all the things that go into them. So you mentioned USGBC and the lead rating system that looks at all sorts of things, you know, energy, water, waste, um, material health. And then the living building challenge is another one that you know goes to kind of the net zero side of the equations of you know, net zero water use, net zero energy use, hyper-awareness on the toxicity and the ingredients and materials. And so those two things kind of made me generalist um when it came to this early on, um, trying to think holistically about all those things when you're designing a building, whether it's um, you know, a school or a hospital or a lab building, those same buckets appear no matter what the building is or a data center. And then, you know, moving to Scanska for the other side of the coin and, you know, be on the construction side. That was really for me a moment where I could go from designing one building following those certifications and thinking through it to how does that apply to you know a large-scale contractor that's building stuff all over the world at a speed and a kind of capacity that you can make strategic choices that can impact a lot of buildings and a lot of construction projects at once across all of those things, all of those buckets. At Sceganska, we started doing a lot of work um for some of the large technology companies, and a lot of those companies were setting lofty goals around the carbon emissions associated with the buildings they were constructing, whether it was office buildings or data centers, and putting out targets across energy use, water use, but also specifically around the emissions of all the things they were buying and what it took to make them. So you can think of the concrete mixes, the steel that goes into it, the rebar framing, um, glass, all of those components, and wanting to really kind of quantify that in a way to understand the share of impact associated with how we manufacture everything. So I spent the past almost 10 years really digging deeply into that through the work at Scanska and then you know, co-launching a nonprofit called Building Transparency and co-conceiving of a tool called uh EC3 that was how people could measure all those things and the emissions around, you know, materials and quantify that and look at it comparatively against the energy and try to figure out how to be informed enough to know where to make really deep investments to reduce the impacts of what they are building, particularly around emissions when you think about energy and materials.

Ryan 10:30

You got an opportunity to go from that design side into now we're now we're applying it and trying to study from a from a general contractor. But talk talk a little bit more about this tool, because you again it goes back to these materials, because sometimes we like the trade-off of selecting one material over the other, or we're like it isn't just like you you make a choice, like there's all this upstream stuff that's happened to get you know all of these different materials and sort of selections made. Because you mentioned, you know, between concrete, like when we think about building a building, there's we can do structural steel, we can do build out concrete, whether it's precast or poured in place, there's mass timber, there's all these solutions for the structural system to the facades and the skins, to, you know, all the finished materials that are inside. As you were going through Wiskanska, at what at what point was it like, okay, I'm doing all of this, but like, man, it's just not very easy to calculate these things to say we we should probably we should probably create something, right? When you mentioned EC3 to help designers do this, like was there like just this, like this is a pain, or was it like, hey, this is a huge opportunity to help to help others as well?

Stacy 11:45

It was a pain first. I mean, I was in it, I was the person at the construction company that was tasked with figuring out how to quantify these things for for Skanska too, because they were setting their own targets, but also for these companies that were were asking us how. And you know, the data's all over all over the place, right? I think in the construction sector, we were at a place where the lead rating system had started to require disclosure of these emissions of how you make stuff through environmental product declarations or EPDs. So these EPDs were starting to proliferate and be published as PDF documents that a supplier could give you so you could check a box and get a point because they disclosed things. So I was in the pain of of finding all of those everywhere as PDF documents and figuring out how to make spreadsheets where I could, you know, put in the name of the material, the manufacturer, and the impact data, and then organize it. And this was pre-AI. So this was when humans still had to do all of this. So yeah, it was still a human effort. And then the opportunity was wow, if I could figure out a way to make this easy for me to put it into a you know a repository and have it just accessible digitally, someone needs to do that. But if I'm gonna do it for me or Scanska's gonna choose to do it for Scanska and we're gonna leverage that for clients, that means that everyone that's like me and every construction company that's like Scanska and every owner that's like the technology companies you were working for um needed this too. So that was the opportunity is how to really kind of think through um unlocking that when we were, you know, in the early days of of trying to figure out how to account for this stuff.

Ryan 14:32

Yeah, when you when you were describing it, I can only you know, just thinking through all the um kind of despair, not desperate, disparate uh information, right? That's out there on this. And you're like, oh, you got a the human side of collecting that, not only the pain of just am I getting the right information, is it accurate? Is it is it current? But when you just said it was like thinking, like, well, that's the whole thing about AI, right? As we start to transition into this data center talk, like that's supposed to take away some of those, you know, the human pieces of doing and pulling all this information to aggregate it, right? And put it out in front of in front of us as an exact executive summary, if you will, to to kind of assess it and figure out like, is this what we want to do? Like, is this the answer that we're looking for to make those decisions? So yeah, I just think that that's a perfect example of how we've transitioned through design and how sort of um our sustainability, you know, documentation has evolved around the building and the build environment to to now the technology that can can speed this up to tell us if we're doing if we're doing what needs to be done and making those choices. But talk a little bit then about like you you mentioned this too, because this is where we can kind of get into a little bit of your work today. Like you you're able to put this technology together or this um this EC3, right? And that gives people better access to the information or a way to kind of collect it, get it into the repository, see that the material is meeting the criteria that is needed to get a certain lead certification, or just respond to an owner or some goal that the company has. Like as you were going through these processes, thinking about data centers and the materials that are used to build them, like what were the materials, like, and we know most of them, but what were there any of the materials that sort of surprised you as you were going through this process and then getting into the day? Like, like most people will say, well, you know, the biggest issue is sustainability or from sustainability is is the energy usage, right? We don't have the power grid, we don't, we don't have all of the infrastructure to take care of these things. Then it's the concrete, and and we started picking and choosing. Were there any surprises as you really began this journey, not just with data centers, but in general with buildings, that you're like, I would have never thought that. Uh that that really sparked an interest for you, or just things that you'd like to share as you went through that journey.

Stacy 17:10

Yeah. I mean, I think um really when we started thinking about how to kind of peel back the layers of the onion, that's the analogy I like to use in all this, is like we're just continuing to peel back these layers and there's more layers, and then your eyes water because it's kind of painful, and then you put on the goggles and you keep on peeling back the layers. Anyhow, as we're doing that, um you know, you have to start somewhere. And so starting with the the both on the energy side, you know, the main drivers of what consumes the energy, but then on the embodied carbon emission side, the manufacturing emissions side of the materials, what are the things we're using the most of? And what are the things that emit the most and how they're made? And so that that led you on most building types into the world of you know, the envelope and enclosure, so concrete, steel, uh, glass, and and looking at those, they are the high impact materials. So you know, you discover that just quantifying some of those um low-hanging fruit things that are obvious, you're getting to 70, 80 percent of the emissions of uh of a typical building. Yeah, so once you've looked at the concrete, steel, and glass and some of those things that are pretty consistent, um, you then have to look at a kind of building you're building or designing and see where those differences start to happen. And that's where it gets really interesting when it comes to what that next layer of the onion is, because for a healthcare facility, it might be the large, you know, HVAC equipment and all the metal and all the things that go through all the stucks. And for, you know, an office building, it might be all the finishes, the carpets and things that go in and replace the furniture even. Um, and then for a data center, you start to get into all the air handling equipment again that's being used to heat and cool and move water around and do all those things, but also you know, all of the all the things that you we are using to compute. So rack servers and you know the the the um the racks they sit in um and how often they replace those things. You start thinking about the emissions of making it and then replacing it. Um and that's really where my work has led me now at ERG, you know, where building transparency is still is still carrying the torch and and doing all the work and providing the access to all of those core construction materials. But that next kind of around the corner thing is what about all the stuff that goes inside some of these types of buildings or even things outside of buildings, which I know isn't the topic of this podcast, but there's lots of other sectors out there too that we're focusing on. The data center equipment kind of falls into that electronics ICT space and is something that hadn't been you know well aggregated or provided in a in a place where you could understand who's disclosing emissions around those things in the same kind of way publicly so that you can you know quantify the impacts of those things when you're you know purchasing them. But also what do the impacts look like when you start to compare or add emissions of that equipment to those core materials that we've been thinking about and caring about and really investing in decarbonizing for the past you know five, 10 years?

Ryan 20:07

As you just said, it was kind of one of those areas that was understudied because the electron and components. So when we like going back to you know the early days of data centers, right, they were they were data centers, they were just different, like the compute GPUs and all the different racks that were kind of put into them, or even the space, like we weren't we were still using more paper than we were storing data, right? In 2000, 2005, probably even, you know, halfway through the 2010s. During that time, was there not like again? You're mentioning there was little to no evidence, you know, evidence or information, I guess, to kind of pull when they were building and designing the data centers, probably not even thought about from a sustainability standpoint. Was that something that you were also recognizing? Like, like for the most case, we just want to get them built. We kind of want to get them unseen and kind of out there. And then all of a sudden, that's sort of like, hey, we're building a lot more of these things and are a lot bigger, and they're taking up a lot more energy and they're taking a lot more material that it just wasn't under, you mentioned electronics were understudy, but just in general, were data centers sort of this thing that were just off to the side and not thought about really often from a sustainability approach?

Stacy 21:25

Yeah, I think from my perspective, at least where I sat, you know, at the architecture firms and then at a construction company. The projects that you focused your calories on when it came to sustainability were the ones that were high profile that you could, you know, talk about publicly and celebrate and have people tour and walk through and see all the sustainable things that you did if I'm reflecting on it and I'm kind of doing this live, actually. You know, you start there because they become the example projects and the ones that people can get inspired by. I don't think data centers were very inspiring or something people would think about or have top of mind then, even as something that you'd think you'd want to promote and advocate for doing better because they're not the buildings people engage with, you know, as humans. So I I do think that they were probably were not they were not focused on from a kind of let's go get lead certification, at least from where I sat in my job in those three different roles. It was more about improving you could do all these things on the projects that people were going to experience and that you could, you know, publish and and talk about in a way that was really inspiring. I mean the conversation's obviously shifting because everyone's building data centers now. It's you know, it's like it is the thing everyone's talking about actually, um, versus the thing we weren't talking or thinking about, you know, maybe 20 years ago.

Ryan 22:38

Yeah. Yeah. I think once once the the bright lights have been put, you know, onto them, and and it's all connected, right? Like people's fears of AI and all of the things and all the the good or the bad noise that continues to happen around AI, they're connected to data centers because that's that's the physical thing that we could see and feel. And we just we knew they existed, but we didn't think about them. It's sort of like seeing an industry, you know, the industrial park or the the big warehouses uh for distribution and things like that. Like most design, like something you said, I think is again going back to that design piece. That's how I thought is like, what did I want on my project portfolio, right? It was like, I didn't want to go design, you know, the warehouses and things, but they were part of of some people's work. They they went and did them, but the ones, like you said, they showcased and spent their energy on because there was so little time for us to do anything as practicing architects, right? Like, like, yeah, that's where we're gonna put it. We're gonna try to get clients to, if we're gonna do uh an MOB or anything in healthcare or a library or school, like it's gonna get the certification. Yeah, right. Um, it doesn't mean that we're ignoring the fact that we're over here designing it, but the energy, like, well, one, they'll never pay for it. Two, we don't even have time to think about it. We're never gonna get the the fee to cover it and it's already tight, you know, tight from a contractor standpoint as well as architects. But now that you're like, you're saying like this light is much brighter, and it's because You you mentioned it, it is everywhere. It's literally the only thing, like if you go to an event or association event, it's the only thing being talked about. Everywhere, oh, there's more jobs because there's more data centers. There's more, you know, and it's just building, and it's like where all the funds are going right now, the capital, um, the energy, the firms, like people, you know, are making more money than they've ever made in construction, going and building uh some of these data centers, which aren't housing or doing any, you know, other than the the AI and the technology side, like they aren't the things that we touch and feel and walk into. We're not, you know, they weren't the thing that was on the front page of your website, right? So what, you know, with with the flashlight being on it now, like in the work that you're doing and the really the study and these things that that you've been kind of focused on with the data, like anything, anything surprising coming up that that is like, man, we're over here talking about this, but like we need to zero in and focus over here. You already mentioned like we weren't talking about the electronics. Well, I got to imagine like the footprint of the racks and everything has changed drastically compared to the data centers of of 2000, 2010, which to me is like, well, they're not, you know, they're probably not made from sustainable material to get the racks or all the components of the CPUs or the GPUs and you know, everything that goes inside of these computes.

Stacy 25:41

I I think there's a couple of things. I mean, I think just the scale of the emissions impact of those kind of non-core construction materials thing, things, because of the sheer quantity that can go in to a data center of the scale we're talking about, right? Like the concrete and steel scale or you know, the the core materials, the structural materials scale horizontally and vertically as a as a box. But the amount of things you're putting in that box scale exponentially, in my mind, and even with the numbers that you can kind of posture or validate. So, you know, if you're doing 14,000 rack servers or you know, some ginormous number like that, which is real with N these concrete and steel, and hopefully mass timber, there's some great examples of of tech companies doing mass timber to help really get that exterior component down, then all of a sudden what you're left with the big impact is the stuff that's going inside, and you're multiplying the emissions and making these things by that, you know, tens of thousands for that one data center. And then because technology shifts and things get faster, and you want your compute to be faster, you might be replacing those things every 10 years. So the multiplication factor just keeps on you know scaling on the emissions of those things. And you know, it's it's similar to like MAP MEP equipment, mechanical electrical plumbing, even today for the kind of other building types. Like you get a handle on the concrete, you start decarbonizing it, you make really good um impacts there. You can use you know, electric arc furnace, recycled content, steel, like you can do good move to mass timber, and so we feel really good. And it's like, holy cow, now we have to try to find the data and quantify all of this stuff. So I don't think it's just a data center problem. I think it's uh an unknown kind of next step. And now we're literate in this kind of data, and we know what we can do if we have it, and how we can use it to make smarter decisions, and how we can actually then invest in in companies and suppliers that are reducing their impacts because they can give us the data to show that. It's just how how we apply it at the scale and speed that we need it for how fast these things are moving, especially in the data center place. I I know there are technology companies and data center builders that are thinking about this internally and and trying to do things and you know, create alignment about how you account for this and move to where we want to be with this data. I just get wrapped around just that the speed and scale and how we being a practitioner that had to do the calculations and try to have people make better decisions, how we can get the data in front of the decisions, because right now decisions are being made so quickly to build these things as fast as they're they're needed or or wanted that that we don't have the stuff we need to help them make smart decisions yet. So there's this flywheel that needs to happen when data generation to help make these decisions at a speed that hopefully if we use AI for good, AI could actually help with if we're going back to the whole cause of all of this. But but yeah, the emissions impact of those like rack servers and generators and things that you know we've been able to actually aggregate data for at ERG in my my new my new effort with product impact, which is another tool, is you know, showing that the emissions of those things can be be twice the emissions of the concrete. And you know, as someone that was so focused on high impact materials that I thought were the ones that if we solve this, we're making such a big dent. But you know, it just makes you want to go do the work there. Um and let let the good work that's happening over here continue on decarbonizing, you know, those high impact core materials at the same time.

Ryan 29:15

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think we can well, one, I'm gonna back up to what you said is like the information isn't getting upstream because we're we're making decisions on the the things that we know today or the unknowns that we just don't have time because we got to move fast enough just to move forward. But it's the, you know, the down now that we don't have any upstream information to make the decision, it's all the downstream stuff that now we're going to really find out the impact, which isn't going to be tomorrow or next week. It's maybe decades from now or a decade, you know, from this point, because that's the same thing that happens all the time, is we just have to rush into building out infrastructure that wasn't planned or thought through of the reality of what might come. And it it is, you know, it's one of those things where it's like you want to see the construction industry benefit and people benefit from building things, but when we're we're not sure of the outcome, like one, building a data center, you know, it maybe it's exciting. It's from a design side, right? Like it's it's complicated, there's complexities to it, it's problem solving. But as you just said, also it's like if we're even thinking sustainability, we're going to go back to to yesterday's thoughts about it and we're going to apply those, which is what we need to, right? Like you said, with the with the concrete and everything. But your the point that you made about you think about like, well, I got the concrete and I got, you know, I got the walls. We don't in an office buildings and everything else, the volume of the space isn't filled to capacity. And in this case, every square foot that it can, other than where you need to, I assume, walk through to access and things like that, right? These huge data farms, like they're gonna use as much square footage and fill as much cubic feet as possible to make sure like air movement and meeting code. That's not, we don't do that in other buildings. Like we don't office space, like you're not stacking, well, you don't stacking desks on top of each other in the same volume, right?

Stacy 31:26

Yeah, the multiplier, I think, is the part that surprised me the most. It it feels very familiar to me because it's what what what we did on some of those, you know, if you look at a building, what's the highest impact materials, right? If you can focus on the top three or four things in a data center that you that are the highest impact in terms of what you're putting in it, whether it's the quantity of the thing or it's the quantity of the thing plus the emissions of the thing, just start to make the dent there and get people providing data for those things so that we can start to understand how we can reduce the impacts of making those things or recycling those things or reusing those things. I think that's really where my mind goes because it's awareness of the thing in the first place. Um, and then applying the lessons and and the successes you had previously, you know, to this new category of material um or artifact that needs it. So yeah, I'm excited about that. I think it's it's exciting to know that and to have data. Like there are brands and suppliers that are publishing either environmental product declarations for rack servers and generators or for product carbon footprints of those things. And and they're available and we've aggregated them, and you can go in and actually build that kind of little model that I talked about to start to see, like, oh, this is this much of the footprint. How's that compared to the concrete over here or the enclosure over here? So I see the path to at least what I'm doing to ERG with with the product impact database and tool stuff, like helping to solve that problem and doing it in a way that's leaning on the lessons of how you know we we did it for other things before in the construction space. But it's it's the time and the scale that if you start really trying to wrap your head around, we need us, you know, a small army of people working on this to really tackle it.

Ryan 33:17

We in the you know the AEC industry, right? Like we we studied the building. And and you can think back through any building that you designed, like for a lot of times, like the IT or the components and those things, like those were a separate contract that weren't things that were always studied. Furniture was one of those that was. And when I just think about not sure, again, I don't design data centers. Um, so I'm not gonna act like I'm an expert in that area, but like this is probably decisions made outside of that sort of realm. Like, you know how to design the mechanical, you know how to get everything else done, but like these are in someone else's uh purview and their responsibility. So, like you said, it's there are people now looking at, you know, how they're making the racks to the I'm for the GPUs or whatever the material is used, that I think you said it so well. Like sometimes what we have to have is an interruption, like this moment of awareness. Like, oh, we didn't, nobody even that was not on anybody's radar because it's not it, you know, it's something we haven't seen, or maybe we've seen it, but now it's just so totally different because of the acceleration of it. Like you mentioned this, like the acceleration of the compute power to quantum and all that other stuff, right? Like, like it's gonna change faster than we've ever seen it. We don't know what happens once, once the data center is live, yeah, how often the stuff is gonna go through sort of into life. Like I don't even know what the shelf life is for this equipment versus say 20 years ago, right? Like when when it wasn't going, it was still going fast, but not as fast as as today, to know how often that these things are gonna have to be switched out.

Stacy 36:00

Yeah, and that's that's again, I think the the layers again, right? Like, you know, the understanding the emissions of making the thing is the first step when you're first buying it. But then if we're really dealing with that kind of turnover, it makes me think of fashion. We're doing work in apparel and stuff too, and like the turnover of and recycling and waste of of fashion. That's how some of these things you have to be thinking about that at the same time you're thinking about the manufacturing emissions of like how how are we making these things so that we can take them apart and recycle and reuse them. And again, this isn't the plug for ERG, it's just that I'm now in a place where there's people just thinking about the circularity stuff and I get to focus on the emissions stuff. And part of my thinking is how you bring all that together and and leverage the the right data at the right point to really hit all the things at once. Because if we don't do that too, like it's such a big, it's such a big thing to take a bite out of. We kind of need people hitting it in all places at once and then like working together and overlapping where they have to. But I think it's possible because I've seen it before with some of these other materials. It's just how we we take that and apply it to some of these things that are now becoming that that next I wanna call it, don't want to call it bright, shiny thing, the next really important or impactful thing just based on how the world is shifting.

Ryan 37:19

Yeah. Well, and I think, yeah, you're you're transitioning, you know, transitioning things that we've known, and how do we how can we utilize those skill sets in order to as as we step into new situations? Like we we have to do that as our you know, as designers and architects and contractors on a daily basis of like, we've never seen this before, but what are the skill sets that I need to bring to it? And what are the new ones that I need to to apply? But I think what you've said that is also just intriguing is this it is it can feel too big for a lot of people of like like this thing's coming at us, and we're being, we feel like it's being forced on us. And and then there are people who are, you know, they're not in the AEC industry either, right? And they're they're feeling the impact of these things. And they're they're screaming like the sustainability side to the energy use, and and maybe they're not wherever they fall right in line, they know it's impacting them because they can see it. And it is for our industry, it is like, how do we how do we study it? How do we work together when the problem seems enormous and we don't feel like we have time to even think about it or do it? And uh, you know, the way these are built anymore, right? Like, I mean, we could you could have a whole podcast on like how the funding works and who actually owns, right? Who's making these decisions to build these things to know like beyond the specification of the whole rack system or whatever, all the components that are going in there, right, for the compute, like that whole chain of command of of decision making upstream of when these things are happening. But it's good to know, like you're saying, that there are you got you've been doing a lot of work on it. You're you're it's now becoming like we're now becoming aware of it. Now the real work sort of begins of how do we how do we improve the data, how do we improve educating, how do we improve our decision making to make sure that that you know, as we're deciding upon what to put in, you know, who to bring in and what to put in, that they are are really conscious about their own embodied emissions, you know, and and and the and the whole process, right? All the way upstream. It's got it's a whole recipe to build whatever it is that that we're building. You said something else about, you know, kind of the HVAC and the mechanical side. I know this goes, this goes a little bit off tangent of of sort of some of these topics that we've been on, but a lot of the talk, you know, the concern is the the energy use, right, of of these, of these systems or or to be able to build the data centers, right? And and a lot of talk is like, you know, there's water usage, and you know, everyone now is saying, you know, hey, these are closed loop. You know, no, I think about like geothermal, I think about like the way mechanical systems have evolved really over the last 20, 25 years, that not only with how we're the materials that we're using are improving to build the building, but the the core systems that go into place, they continue to get more efficient and get alternative energy opportunities to utilize them, as well as like how you know, thinking about, you know, the compute and the rack systems, like as we're shifting from really today, like what are the real opportunities for people who are early stage designing these things or thinking about them of like how they could be thinking about you know the mechanical systems to the to the materials of the core and shell, to to the racks, from your expertise, right? Your your lived experiences of studying these, like are there sh, you know, things that you're like, hey, this this will actually you know make a major impact if we start to think about it.

Stacy 41:21

I mean, I think I'll be honest, I haven't thought about it at this scale on the data center side when it comes to the water systems or the energy systems that are being deployed. But I I can I can see the systems that we deployed on you know large campuses and then uh office buildings and healthcare projects that I I think can be replicated. There needs to be people working just on that too. Again, this is such a big there were so many the the different silos I talked about or pillars I talked about in some of these rating systems or the things that we tackled holistically. There's the water use, the energy use, the material emissions, the uh material health is another thing, right? And we kind of need like the the specialists and all of those things to take everything they've learned from the past on these on these projects where you have found those systems that do all these things, they connect things, there's closed loop systems, there's grid level systems for you know, five blocks of I'm trying to think of the word for that, but you know, there's just so many different things that we've proven um and the people that know them need to take them and scale them to the the size and the speed of data center design and construction. I think that if I was just gonna put it in like a sentence, that's really what I would say is that I'm confident we actually have 80% maybe of the solutions in terms of the technicality around all of those things, how they work, what they can make efficient, even how we collect the data on the material side. We we have all of those pieces. It's really the question of the piece, people that know those things, how you take it and you you wrap your head around how to scale it to this problem or this challenge now. So I don't want to try to answer that question for I'm not the expert in those systems. Right. I think that's what we need everyone who is an expert in any one of these things to do is really shift their mind. And that's what I've been trying to do, you know, with moving kind of my my my focus from those core construction materials to things that um I see as the next kind of big challenges. Data center equipment, electronics, definitely. I would love to do a whole other podcast, probably not with you since you're focused on AEC stuff on what we're what we're finding in sectors like apparel for some of the state that exists and all those things. But you know, it's just it's it's not copy pasting, but it's definitely leveraging you know all the things that I think we have successfully proven. Even the I don't want to minimize the work that a large a lot of these large companies, these these owners, especially in the technology space, have done to really invest in in projects and solutions, even at like manufacturing facilities to decarbonize house mitt and concrete and steel are made. And really test these new materials like mass timber. Like we know even how to do that, and they're figuring out ways to, you know, go in together and invest in these things to actually make the manufacturing of these high-impact materials less we do we did do that for some of these things on the you know, electronics ICT space too. Semiconductors, really, you know, upstream are the thing. And so how do you how do they all come together and invest in the manufacturers to help them figure out a way to reduce the emissions of those and then recycle them and all those things? So I could keep talking about that. But I a lot of work's been done, a lot of really good work, and that work continues on those things where we've we found those solutions, and now it's like how we could all just clone ourselves and like take a copy of ourselves. Maybe we need to train our own AI bots or agents upon ourselves, right? Like give them our brains and say, go solve. Here's what we done, we've done, we know it works. I'll go apply this to data centers um at that scale. Yeah, that's really the challenge that I I think about a lot. It's just uh there's not enough people doing this work that's always been a problem too.

Ryan 45:04

Um that's a whole other well, and I think it it's a fair thing to bring up because you said it, and I uh whether you meant it this way or not, it just triggered in my head of like we end up in default mode on projects in our industry where it's just rinse and repeat. So we just keep, and and this thing is accelerating. And you talked about it. Like, if we're gonna keep building and building and building, we may just rinse and repeat, I think you said the same specifications. And and sometimes the the greatest interruption we can have as you know, from an industry, and I hate the I hate the word disruption. I've I've used it in the past, like my passcode, but like disruption is negative. So, like an interruption in a pattern, like when we find ourselves in default mode of just keep specifying things the way we've always known it to be, and and just grabbing the last spec or whatever it was, like we're not validating the current situation and whether anything has changed. And sometimes the the best interruption that we can have is someone who isn't an expert with the topic or or whatever it is. So, like you said, it's like you weren't the expert in it. I think it's fair with what you said of like like how can we, you know, just from a curiosity level, like how can we just explore these things that we we have been able to do in the past to try to duplicate or implement in a much larger scale. Well, I'm sure, as you said, there are probably plenty of people studying some of these things and and going through and doing it. But if they, if they aren't aware of some of the stuff and the studies that that you've been putting together and the groups that you've been working with on the things that aren't necessarily building and trying to understand where you pull that data, they could just be in default mood. And I think that's that's the whole reason I wanted to talk to you was like these. This opportunity is sort of like as the thing's going really fast, like, how do we just like put something in front to slow down to say, like, hey, we all know there isn't enough humans to accomplish some of these things, but like it may feel big, but like people like you, Stacy, and others that are like, hey, I'm just waving a flag over here. Like, I think we should pay attention. Like, we're all looking here, but we should pay attention to this other thing that is embodying more, you know, more cock, you know, more carbon and the emissions are higher than we we've ever thought. And we haven't been tracking it, haven't been thinking about it. Uh, so I think it's important, important for those things that you just laid out and kind of said, regardless of, you know, I don't even mechanical inside, thinking about coming from architecture, right? Like sometimes the best interruption for a consultant from an architectural is to ask that question that we're we think they're gonna look at as be like, you got like nine heads right now, but they suddenly rethink their design and and kind of come back with something better. So what else, um, Stacy? Like, is there something else that maybe maybe I haven't asked you uh a question that you were like, oh, I wish you would have asked me this, or or a study or something, like you said, like the whole fashion industry, like because I think in the in the end, I think a lot of the way things get manufactured, we could all be learning from one another, right? Like you just said with timber and everything else to get efficiency. But is there something like you're just like, hey, like I want listeners to know this? You you know, we didn't really de dive into it, but you want to share it.

Stacy 48:35

In the space I lived in and and where I am now, like the the realization this process of manufacturing stuff, emitting stuff, documenting that, publishing it, using that information to actually buy lower emitting stuff, pushing the manufacturer to reduce emissions and how they make this stuff because we now know what they're emitting, and then redo you know, actually actually making impact and reducing reducing those emissions of how we make things apply to anything. And that's really what I've been able to dig into at ERG is you know, outside of construction, where does this data exist already? How can we aggregate that to get people started? Where do we need this data for high impact things where it doesn't because it's all still proprietary or you know they haven't put this process in place? How can we help them see that they can actually do all those things? And that's it's led us into electronics. It led us into this kind of ICT equipment because we found the data. It led us into apparel. And if you think about a sector that upstream materials have such a big impact, things like you know, cotton production, you know, polyester and the plastics that go into those fabrics. We can apply the same thing that I just said we could apply to the equipment for data centers to to any of those things and people that buy and make any of those things to. And so, you know, I think I had my blinders on and not my blinders, but my my focus, like my my spotlight on construction, because that's what I knew my whole career. And then that spotlight just has grown to how we can really apply this across everything. So if you're not in the construction sector or you're just interested in some of these other sectors and and the impacts and where there's differences to be made and emissions to be reduced, like there is data, and that's what we're putting into our database at ERG. And there are pathways to actually leverage data like that to really make big investments and decarbonizing all sorts of things.

Ryan 50:37

I mean, I think one, we can all have interests outside of AEC and just know like everything we encounter in life, right? Is yeah, there's the build environment, but like so many of the other things that you're talking about. Like we have to, we can't just can't just be the AEC industry addressing this, right? Like everybody has to be zeroed in and and and kind of understanding the data and knowing that the data exists. Is there, you know, regulations over here or not over here, or is it intrinsic because we we believe that it's something that should be studied and kind of understood? But I think I think too often that we think like the outside influencers can have no impact on how we do things. And I think especially with the AC industry, I think outside influencers are and and and having hearing a perspective from others that suddenly you're like, wait, like we we have that problem in this industry.

Stacy 51:35

I just have to that the funniest one one of the funniest things that happened when I started talking to brands and manufacturers of non-construction materials, folks in the apparel sector or or in electronics. And I would show them what we had done or accomplished as an industry or as a sector in construction and point into some of those examples. They would say, But our our materials and supply chain is just so much more complicated. Like everyone thought that their thing was the most complicated thing, which is fair because that's what you are living and what you know. Then you start to unpack like within a a building, you've got 300 different materials or products or things, right? And then of those 300 things, they all have upstream supply chains of the stuff that make them. You think about a laptop. I mean, how many components are in a laptop compared to a building? And you can start to like make the you can start to show the path where actually, you know, it's all complicated. It may be differently complicated, but there is our solutions that can can be cross-sector and and kind of address those things. So that's just interesting to hear because it would be the first common thing I would hear. It's just more complicated for me. But it's just differently complicated. And that's okay. Um, yeah.

Ryan 52:45

Well, and I think I I think that's a perfect point, is that we all have our blinders on to our industry and believe like what I've got to do or what we're doing is the hardest thing. But when you do break it down in this the simplest form, like go back to first principle, like it it really is like a supply chain that's got to start, right? It begins with an idea, and then you're trying to figure out like how do you build that idea and finding where all those components come from. All we're doing, like even in a building, it's just a lot of, you know, a lot of different people putting something, like a raw material into something else, getting it manufactured and shipped. That's how everything is made. And I think with the way you just said it, is like like we we sometimes just have to allow ourselves to study and hear from outside influencer or you know, outside influencers and and kind of reading books that aren't aren't about like what we do for a living that suddenly like capture us, like, ooh, yeah, like I I do think that or feel that, or I have seen that. And this is something I can reapply because I think more and more that's how stuff gets created. Yeah, because it suddenly allows you to like think and see it from like a different lens than you've been looking at it. So I'm glad that you shared it because you you have you have had a journey of of you know, we both started in the architecture side, we've both gotten to work in construction, you've gotten to do some other thing. You're we've taken obviously different paths, but like those things, like when when all of a sudden you hear it from someone else or a different perspective, you're something like, wow, we've been translating that wrong the whole time. Yep. Um, so I appreciate you know you being willing to kind of come on and have this talk. I know you've got reports out there, you know, ERG, the the Eastern Research Group, you all the work that you're doing, work with the government, work with uh companies and individuals, all the different um sectors, like like I'd be curious enough to go dig through some of those articles. I started going through them, and I'm like, this this seems like something I would I'd want to read about. So I'm glad that you, you know, during your journey, you like you said, hey, look, I could have held on to, we could have held on to this. We could have, we could have not worked on this calculator, but your whole story is sort of like this is bigger than me. And I I just want to help people kind of see and recognize where the data is or how they utilize it and how I can help help kind of other companies and other other individuals. So I appreciate you being willing to come on, um, have this conversation and kind of share, share more about the things that you've been looking at.

Stacy 55:34

Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's been a great conversation and it's made me think about a few things I hadn't hadn't thought about before, too, which is great.

Ryan 55:42

Yeah. Oh, good. That's uh that's a that's part of the part of the exercise here on activating curiosity. So thanks so much for coming on, Stacey.

Stacy 55:50

Thank you.

Ryan 55:51

All right, thank you. So that is the episode with Stacy Smedley. Uh, hope you all enjoyed it. I some of these conversations, like they are really about opening up our minds and trying to again think like like breaking the pattern, breaking the way that we've always thought about something, breaking through. And Stacy mentioned this, like suddenly, like we can all think like, hey, I got the toughest job. We have the toughest industry. We, we have this is this is how we are and this is how we work. But having an outside influencer sort of ask you a question or kind of hear it from that perspective suddenly brings you uh new information that you didn't have before. And that new information allows you to explore things that suddenly, suddenly make the process even better than we thought before, as far as the questions that we should be asking and the exploration that we should be doing. So I hope you enjoyed the conversation. And if you're enjoying all of the conversations we're having, be sure to follow us on any of the platforms where you get your podcast. Be sure to follow us and subscribe on our YouTube channel and share it with your network because we want to have more conversations like we just did with Stacy. Get them out to our network, but also kind of share them with people who are just more interested in sustainability, maybe not even part of the construction industry. So until next time, I hope you continue to look at those things that you're like, hey, this is important. I think we've been ignoring it, or it's something that's just been top of mind, but you haven't had time to find it. Figure out how much time you actually think you need to just poke at it a little bit, read about it something, and allow some of those outside influencers in your life to spend some time with them and have them asking you different questions than maybe other people who are constantly within your network aren't asking to see what that might expose. So continue to activate your curiosity and continue to activate curiosity within others. The Activating Curiosity podcast is brought to you by Connective Consulting Group and Connective Coaching, part of the Curiosity Building Experiences. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe so you'll never miss a conversation. Share the podcast with your network and help us bring more curiosity into the construction industry. Interested in becoming a guest or a sponsor? Visit us at activatingcuriosity.com for more details. Until next time, keep leading with curiosity.