We All Need to Become Climate Reality Leaders Within Our Industry

T.Loop’s CSO & CMO, Cecilia Hjertzell, has just returned from Rome, Italy, after an intense 3-day Climate Reality Leadership Training by the Climate Reality Project. This program focused on climate science, communications, and organizing to inspire communities worldwide to take action, all under the guidance of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Now a certified Climate Reality Leader, Cecilia is part of a global network of 3.5 million people dedicated to building a just and sustainable Net-Zero future. This network is shaping the climate conversation everywhere—from family dinners to international summits—and fostering a 21st-century movement for solutions.

We asked Cecilia to summarize her thoughts from the training:

It felt like a 3-day marathon at a sprint pace, filled with education, devastation, but mostly encouragement and empowerment. Besides the high-quality training, it has been a blessing to become part of this fantastic network of engaged people committed to fixing the future.

Former Vice President Al Gore is the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project

One of the things former U.S Vice President Al Gore emphasized was the importance of finding your way of contributing to the future. For me, this mission aligns with T.Loop’s goal to change how we build and operate data centers.

Today, the trend is going in the wrong direction. We build hyperscale data centers with capacities up to 1000 MW, consuming enormous amounts of energy, and we fail to capture the excess heat generated. Currently, data centers worldwide produce enough heat to warm 31 million houses annually. However, the way they are built and operated, we don’t capture this excess heat. Instead, we use even more energy to get rid of it. The explosion of AI is driving data centers' energy use up almost exponentially, which has hindered the phase-out of coal energy plants.

Also attending the training in Rome was Björn Larsson, CEO of Foresight Group, who kindly gave me a copy of his and Mark Drewell’s book, Changing The World We Create: Beyond Climate Crises.

On the way back from Rome, I started reading this fascinating and relevant book that presents the complexity of this challenge in a graspable and comprehensive way. A piece of text that stuck with me was :

Why do we collectively create results that nobody wants? What keeps us locked into old ways that no longer work? And what can we do to transform these patterns that keeps us firmly in the grip from the past?

The data center industry plays a crucial role in the green energy transition, but we cannot continue building data centers as we used to. IT customers have a significant role in shaping the industry. We need to build much smaller data centers in cities where the heat is needed, utilizing existing buildings to avoid unnecessary carbon footprints.

And I would really like to encourage IT customers to start demanding waste heat recovery from us data center operators. Already, we waste heat equivalent to that used by 31 million homes. This fact alone should signal that something must change in our industry to maintain the momentum of digitalization in line with the green transition.

With this in mind, I look forward to fueling our work at T.Loop with the new knowledge gained from the Climate Reality Leadership training and network, continuing our efforts to transform our industry.

Because it is crucial to remember that We MUST, We CAN and We WILL solve the Climate Crisis!