数据中心生命周期评估：新的可持续性标准

Data Center Life Cycle Assessments: A New Sustainability Standard

数据中心生命周期评估提供了一种全面的可持续性衡量方法，涵盖从建设、运营到退役全过程的环境影响。

Data center life cycle assessments offer a holistic approach to sustainability measurement, capturing environmental impacts from construction through operation to decommissioning.

数据中心生命周期评估揭示了建设过程中隐藏的环境成本，能够捕捉到某些运营指标所忽略的碳排放影响。

Data center life cycle assessments reveal the hidden environmental costs of construction, capturing carbon impacts that some operational metrics could miss.

通过审视从建设、实施、运营到最终退役的各个阶段，数据中心生命周期评估正在改变行业评估环境影响的方式，实现对整体可持续性足迹的全面评估。

Data center life cycle assessments are transforming how the industry evaluates environmental impact by examining the complete sustainability footprint across all phases – from construction and implementation through operations to eventual decommissioning.

虽然传统指标主要关注运营效率，但这种整体方法揭示了数字基础设施的真实环境成本，并发现了此前被忽视的可持续改进机会。

While traditional metrics focus primarily on operational efficiency, this holistic approach reveals the true environmental cost of digital infrastructure and identifies previously overlooked opportunities for sustainability improvements.

关于数据中心可持续性的讨论大多集中在其在正常运营期间消耗的电力和水资源上。

Much of the conversation about data center sustainability focuses on the amount of power and water data centers consume during normal operations.

但这些数据只反映了可持续性的一部分，忽略了建设和退役阶段等关键环境影响。

But that data only captures part of the sustainability picture. It overlooks other key aspects, such as the environmental impact of data center construction and decommissioning.

因此，人们日益呼吁开展数据中心生命周期评估——这种方法旨在对数据中心及其内部IT设备在整个生命周期中的可持续性进行全面分析。

Hence, the growing call for data center life cycle assessments – a method that aims to provide a holistic analysis of the sustainability of data centers and the IT equipment inside them across all phases of their life cycles.

问题是：生命周期评估是否真的能推动更好的可持续实践？还是只让企业有更多自由选择所采集的数据，从而让它们的数据中心看起来比实际更具可持续性？

The question is: Will life cycle assessments drive better sustainability practices? Or do they merely give companies greater liberty to pick and choose the sustainability data they collect, enabling them to make their data centers appear more sustainable than they actually are?

数据中心生命周期评估是对一个数据中心整体环境影响的分析。它考虑了生命周期中三个关键阶段的能耗、水耗和污染情况：

A data center life cycle assessment is an analysis of the total environmental impact of a data center. It considers the energy consumption, water use and pollution associated with three key stages of the data center life cycle:

• 建设阶段：评估在建设物理设施、安装IT设备并将其运输到现场过程中所消耗的能源。
• Implementation: A life cycle      assessment determines how much energy is expended to build physical data      center facilities, construct IT equipment inside data centers and      transport it on site.
  
  
• 运营阶段：追踪数据中心在运营期间的能源和水资源使用情况。
• Operation: Life cycle assessments      track the energy and water used by data centers while they are in      operation.
  
  
  

• 退役阶段：评估数据中心及其内部设备退役时所产生的能耗和污染。

• Decommissioning: Assessments also      measure the energy consumption and pollution associated with      decommissioning data centers and the equipment inside them when they are      no longer in use.

数据中心生命周期评估的理念直到最近才开始进入主流。首篇支持该实践的重要学术文章发表于2023年，微软研究人员主导的另一篇重要文章则于2025年4月发表。

The concept of data center life cycle assessments has only recently begun to become mainstream. The first major academic article advocating for the practice appeared in 2023. Another notable article on the topic, led by Microsoft researchers, appeared in April 2025.

从某种角度看，评估整个数据中心生命周期的可持续性非常有意义。如果企业只关注其设施在承载IT负载时用电和用水的效率，那么他们看到的只是部分全貌。

Viewed from one perspective, assessing sustainability across the entire data center life cycle makes a great deal of sense. If companies look only at how efficiently their facilities use electricity and water while they’re hosting IT workloads, they capture just one part of the picture.

生命周期评估可以实现更全面的分析，并指出数据中心运营商可能忽略的可持续性薄弱环节。例如，他们可能发现，虽然采用水冷等技术提升了能效，但这些可持续性的提升却被早期高能耗的建设过程所抵消。

Life cycle assessments can enable a more holistic analysis and highlight sustainability weak points that data center operators may be overlooking. They might find, for example, that even though a data center uses power very efficiently thanks to techniques like water cooling, those sustainability gains are offset by energy-inefficient construction practices earlier in the data center’s life cycle.

但也存在一个风险，即企业可能利用生命周期评估来误导性地展示其可持续性表现。

That said, there’s also a risk that companies could use life cycle assessments to paint misleading pictures of sustainability.

主要原因在于，与数据中心建设和退役相关的可持续性数据难以用标准方式进行衡量，结果轻则造成比较不一致，重则让企业有机会人为提升其可持续性数据。

The main reason is that much of the data associated with the sustainability of data center construction and decommissioning is difficult to measure in a standardized way, which at best leads to inconsistent comparisons and at worst creates opportunities for businesses to boost their sustainability numbers.

毕竟，在数据中心运营期间，有广泛使用的标准化指标，如PUE（电源使用效率）和WUE（水资源使用效率）。但对于建设阶段的能源消耗，或退役阶段的电子垃圾，目前没有相应的统一衡量指标。

After all, there are widely used, standardized metrics – namely,PUE and WUE – for measuring the sustainability of a data center when it is in operation. But there are no equivalent metrics for determining how much energy is used to build a data center. Nor is there a consistent way of quantifying the e-waste associated with data center decommissioning.

数据中心生命周期评估提供了从“摇篮到坟墓”的可持续性全景，从建筑材料到电子废弃物都涵盖其中。

Data center life cycle assessments provide a ‘cradle-to-grave’ sustainability picture, from building materials to e-waste.

即便存在这些数据的标准化指标，数据中心运营商通常也难以完全掌握这些信息。他们必须依赖第三方（如建筑材料供应商）在运营前后阶段收集相关的可持续性数据。鉴于现代供应链的复杂性，确保这些测量数据准确、一致将非常困难。

Even if there were standardized metrics for these types of data, data center operators typically would have limited visibility into them. They would have to rely on third parties (like vendors who supply construction materials) to collect sustainability metrics during the pre- and post-operation stages of the data center life cycle. Given the complexity of modern supply chains, it would be tricky to ensure accurate, consistent sustainability measurements.

生命周期评估还面临其他执行层面的挑战，例如，数据中心内部的IT设备在运营过程中会不断更替新旧，无法仅凭开业当日的设备配置来准确衡量整座数据中心的设备制造能耗。

There are other logistical challenges associated with data center life cycle assessments, too, such as the fact that the IT equipment inside facilities can change constantly as newer devices replace older ones. You can‘t simply calculate the sustainability of producing the servers that populate a data center on the day it opens and say that the calculation accurately reflects the total energy consumed to manufacture servers housed in the facility.

此外，一些数据中心运营商（如托管型设施运营商）甚至可能不知道其建筑内有哪些IT设备，因为这些设备属于客户，而非运营商自身所有。

On top of this, some types of data center operators, like those that run colocation facilities, may not even know which IT equipment exists inside their buildings because it’s owned by their customers, not the data center operator.

生命周期评估的倡导者并未忽视这些挑战。例如，前文提到的微软研究团队就指出，在量化可持续性时，不同类型数据的缺失是一个复杂因素。他们也承认数据质量存在局限性。但总体上，他们认为仍然可以克服这些问题，获得对数据中心全生命周期相对有效、虽不完美但有意义的可持续性评估结果。

Proponents of data center life cycle assessments have not ignored challenges like these. For instance, the Microsoft researchers who produced the article cited above mention the lack of various types of data as a complicating factor when attempting to quantify sustainability. They also recognize that the quality of sustainability data can be limited. But they generally conclude that it’s possible to work around these challenges and gain a meaningful, albeit imperfect, measure of data center sustainability across the entire life cycle.

只要数据中心企业以诚意和一致性努力评估各生命周期阶段的可持续性，生命周期评估确实可以更准确地反映数据中心的“绿色”水平。

So long as data center companies make good-faith efforts to calculate sustainability across all life cycle stages consistently, life cycle assessments do indeed stand to provide a more accurate representation of how “green” data centers truly are.

但如果这种评估方法持续流行，就必须确保企业不会“挑选性”采集数据、误导性展示其绿色表现，因为目前生命周期各阶段尚缺乏统一的评估标准和数据指南。

But if this assessment method continues to grow in popularity, it will be critical to ensure that it doesn’t lead to misuse by companies that cherry-pick the data they choose to assess, because there are no standardized guidelines for which data to measure across many parts of the life cycle.

否则，生命周期评估可能会变成类似“碳抵消”那样的工具——一种使数据中心“看起来”更可持续，实则掩盖真实环境成本的手段。

If that happens, data center life cycle assessments could end up playing a role similar to carbon offset purchases – another technique that can make data centers look more sustainable than they actually are.