Speeches
Opening Remarks by SMS Janil Puthucheary at ATxSummit Digital Sustainability Forum
30 May 2024
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Ladies and Gentlemen, a very good morning. It is my pleasure to be here with all of you today.
Digital Sustainability is a critical issue that affects all of us. In this digital age, the demand for compute power has surged; it’s driven by technologies such as generative AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and who knows what’s going to be the next big thing. But we can generally bet that bandwidth, connectivity and cybersecurity, these are key things that are going to require the compute capabilities.
But there is a need to balance the economic and social benefits of digital applications with the environmental effects that result from the emissions. Digital Sustainability affects us all, and we need to address it holistically, requiring us to take an ecosystem view, and working across in partnership with different players in the system. Let me start by looking at our digital connectivity infrastructure.
Digital Connectivity Infrastructure
On the connectivity infrastructure front, much of Singapore’s Digital Economy’s growth is underpinned by data centres. They house the compute power, they process our digital activities and support every industry. We know that our ICT sector accounts for about 17% of our GDP. We know that DCs are collectively our biggest indirect carbon emitter. They contribute to 82% of Singapore’s Information & Communications (I&C) sector emissions, and 7% of Singapore’s total electricity consumption.
As the demand for digital and AI compute continues to rise, the need for DC capacity will grow. At the same time, we need to ensure that Singapore remains on track for our peak CO2 emissions by 2030, and net-zero by 2050. These are our international climate commitments. We have every intention of standing by the Paris Agreement. So, we need to find a way to turn strengths into opportunity. This requires growth through sustainability, and turning constraints into opportunity. As Singaporeans would know, there is a song that goes “We have done it before, we will do it again.”
The challenge of sustainable growth is not unique to Singapore, but we are well placed, perhaps uniquely placed, to deliver innovative solutions that could help the region and the rest of the world. We come from a position of strength, as a regional DC hub. Industry and government here share a strong commitment to stay at the forefront of DC sustainability. We introduced the world’s first Tropical DC standard at ATx Enterprise last year, which guides DCs to increase their operating temperatures in tropical climates like Singapore’s, thus reducing their power needs for cooling. We are unlikely a country to be a regional DC hub, but we stepped outside of our comfort here. The temperature and humidity do not suggest that we should naturally be a DC, but yet we are. We have to find ways to make sure those DCs are increasingly operating at higher temperatures and reducing manpower. This process complements existing DC sustainability certifications and standards like the Green Mark for DCs that were developed in partnership with industry stakeholders, such as many of you seated here today.
Additionally, we have enabled the continued growth of new and leading DCs in Singapore such as through initiatives like the pilot Call-For Application (CFA) in 2022, which facilitated the sustainable building of new DC capacity. Through all of these processes, from the various understandings over the last few years, we have seen innovation in this space. We have seen the use of the best-in-class technologies, operating models, and new entrants into the space. These have raised the bar, for best-in-class energy-efficient facilities, and the adoption of energy-efficient equipment.
Last year, we launched the Digital Connectivity Blueprint (DCB), and this put out our intention to chart a path for the continued growth for green DCs in Singapore and push the digital sustainability envelope even further. This would ensure that DCs continue to support our digital economy ambitions and meet our global climate commitments.
The Green DC roadmap, just announced by DPM Heng earlier this morning, charts out the key pathways for that continued growth. The roadmap, published by the Infocommunications Media Development Authority (IMDA), outlines this holistic approach where they take an ecosystem view and highlights our commitment to partner industry to build a dynamic DC sector, which continues to serve the rest of the world, and be at the leading edge of sustainability.
The DCs are key catalysts for partnerships across the ecosystem, to deliver efficiency improvements and green energy solutions. Through the roadmap, we seek to pioneer innovative solutions by facilitating such partnerships. The roadmap is not only about using existing tools and technologies. We do know how to use the best-in-class that we already know about today. We want to put in place a process to develop further innovations, further experimentation, to then realise the possibilities of increasing the capacity.
The roadmap provides for at least 300 megawatts of additional capacity in the near term, and potentially another 200 megawatts and more through green energy deployments. Through the additional capacity, we aim to seed innovative ways to accelerate green energy efficiency, and to grow more capacity through using green energy. There are a couple of key thrusts that we are going to put in place to do this:
a. First, we want to enhance efficiency. We have to do so at both the hardware as well as the software. We have to put in place best-in-class technologies to maximise energy efficiency and capacity, energy-efficient IT equipment and encourage green software techniques.
b. Second, we have to facilitate the DCs to accelerate their use of green energy. So efficiency, one big thrust, and then the use of green energy. Deploying increasing proportion of green energy at scale to maximise opportunities for continued growth.
c. And that’s why I phrased it with “potentially another 200 megawatts and more through green energy deployments.” Because if we are successful at that delta, being thoroughly green, there’s no reason that we should then automatically limit ourselves. The process of developing that extra 200 megawatts is what we’re planning for the next bound of ambition.
To encourage the DCs to become energy efficient, the government will provide support to the industry.
a. DCs looking to improve their facility level efficiency can tap on schemes such as EDB’s Resource Efficiency Grant for Emissions (REG€) and the Investment Allowance for Emissions Reduction.
b. Enterprise users will be incentivised to switch to energy-efficient IT equipment, through ESG’s Energy Efficiency Grant, and this will be expanded to include the DC sector.
The roadmap sets out low-carbon energy sources that DCs can explore, which include bioenergy, fuel cells with carbon capture, low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia for a start. We welcome proposals from the industry to push boundaries in realising these pathways in Singapore.
Much has been said about energy, and we should also focus on the efficient use of other resources, such as water, which is increasingly becoming important as rack densities rise. In 2021, the median Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) of DCs that were large was 2.2 cubic meters per megawatt hour. Moving forward, IMDA will work with PUB to help DCs improve their WUE to 2.0 cubic meters or less over the medium term.
Importance of Software
Improving DC efficiency is not just about improving energy efficiency at the hardware level. It is also about greening software – including software deployed within our DCs. We have been working to lower the carbon emissions of software applications.
In Jan 2024, we announced the launch of two key programmes targeted at lowering carbon emissions of software applications, promoting sustainable practices and the efficient use of computing resources.
We committed $30 million to drive research in optimising software design and functions for green energy efficiency through the Green Computing Fund Initiative (GCFI), enabling our local Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) to collaborate with the industry to solve problems relating to green computing, where they focus on problems that are currently unmet by commercial solutions, such as carbon-aware data computation and leveraging hardware improvements for co-optimisation of hardware and software.
We also invited digital application users to participate in green software trials to test the effectiveness of carbon reduction techniques for software development. These trials will generate valuable data and insights for IMDA to create green software guidelines for the industry.
a. We thank all our partners who are working together with IMDA for the trials. The entire process that I’ve described - whether it’s about what we’re doing with hardware, our standards, trust marks, how we target our incentives, and now software - all of this is possible because industry has been willing to partner with us, to experiment with us and co-develop our way forward. Why am I saying this? Because I’m making a pitch. The trials are still open, so if you’re attending here today, and you haven’t participated in a trial, I have a QR code to invite you to join us in shaping the future of digital sustainability. We have to do this together.
Digital Sustainability is a shared responsibility. We deeply value our collaborations with international partners in co-creating best practices for green software and digital solutions for the industry to adopt.
In 2023, Singapore was the first government to join the Green Software Foundation.
a. We joined the foundation with the aim of promoting green practices, and to reach a mutual consensus on methods to effectively measure the environmental impact of our software solutions. And we understood that this was not something that we could say, well, the industry does it, the Foundation does it. We as a government still have a role to play. We do hardware procurement, we design our own software, in fact we operate our own applications. We have to take some responsibility and we committed to joining the Green Software Foundation.
b. Just last month (April 2024), the Green Software Foundation achieved the ISO Standard status for its Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification. It’s a significant milestone, because companies now have access to a standardised methodology to calculate the rate of carbon emissions for their software. The history of developing the space, whether it was flurocarbons or tailpipe emissions, it starts with the issue of what is it you measure? How do you come to some agreement across the industry? It is not necessarily as headline grabbing as perhaps several million dollars worth of incentives and grants, but it is an extremely important step to be able to decide on a standard, and have people measure themselves up against best practices. It ultimately enables more environmentally sustainable practices within the technology sector.
i. I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate Sanjay Podder, Chair of the Green Software Foundation, for this achievement. Well done, Mr Sanjay.
Building Collective Capabilities
It is important for governments to build our collective capabilities, to share knowledge and our best practices with one another. IMDA’s digital sustainability efforts were featured in a newly released report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The report, one of the first of its kind, examines digital sustainability across the AI value chain, and highlights Singapore as a key case study in pioneering efforts to advance the agenda in green AI practices. We thank them for the recognition but we engaged in this work precisely for the opportunity to experiment, to learn from the best around the world, and hopefully to see some of those best practices employed.
I’ve talked a lot about what the government is doing, what industry is doing, and I’ve talked a lot about the balance between sustainability and the economic opportunities. But the technologies that we’re trying to develop, it’s not only about the business opportunities, it’s not only about the economic opportunities. Here in Singapore, we are hoping to drive and consistently shape the idea that AI and these technologies can and must be used for the Public Good. I want to highlight that this approach is starting to bear fruit.
We have a health technology agency called Synapxe, and we have a whole series of healthcare tech providers.
a. Synapxe has a newly launched platform called HEALIX. It’s the first comprehensive cloud-based analytics platform for our entire public healthcare sector. If you know the way health technology works, healthcare sector works, you have multiple players with multiple layers, academic institutions, and technology. Given the privacy concerns and security concerns associated with health data, it’s a big cost of the compliance work.
b. But using the technologies that are available today, in a way that perhaps you wouldn’t have imagined only a couple of years ago, we can now deploy at a scale across the entire public healthcare sector, cloud-based analytics platform, cloud-native tools, and rapidly bringing AI-based tools to bear on patient care. AI bringing together public healthcare sector’s data on a single platform, opening up collaborative possibilities, data driven insights and the use of AI. Making that idea of AI for the Public Good real, not in some future imagined possibility but today, deploying and driving AI. But AI for the Public Good, just like all the other things that we talked about, will require multi-stapling. This type of thing was only possible because we’ve had that close collaboration between our health tech agency, finance, the industry players like AWS, and all of our healthcare providers and academic institutions who contribute useful data.
c. Every single example that we have out there, which demonstrates these values or principles, is going to require this type of close collaboration. I look forward to many more such examples in the near to medium term, and to do so, we will continue to work hand in glove with the industry to build and implement solutions to enhance digital sustainability. Everybody here who’s not already signed up for a trial, co-created substandard, contributed to one of our reports – we have many QR codes.
Thank you very much for inviting me to join you today at The Digital Sustainability Forum. I hope that what we do today will catalyse ideas, drive constructive discussions, and help shape Singapore’s sustainable digital future. Thank you all very much.
Charting green growth pathways at scale for data centres in Singapore (Factsheet)