Building a sustainable future with ASHRAE standards

By James Kirkwood, Head of Technical Sales, EkkoSense AI

I really enjoyed last week’s ASHRAE UK Chapter Building Services Exhibition at Loughborough University that I attended with my colleague, EkkoSense Co-Founder Dr Stu Redshaw. This year we focused on the growing global impact of Data Centres, highlighting the key role that ASHRAE Standards play in helping organisations to deliver against their target operational performance goals.

What’s great about these and other ASHRAE events is the sheer breadth of attendees, with this latest UK Chapter event bringing together key ASHRAE personnel, professionals such as consulting engineers, contractors, manufacturers, lecturers and architects, as well as future graduates and PhD students – who will hopefully soon be filling the building services and data centre industry’s widely-acknowledged skills gaps. 

Whether you’re a student, an early-career building services professional, or a seasoned data centre engineer, everyone was able to come together to discuss the event theme – “Empowering our Workforce: Building a Sustainable Future”. What was impressive was the sense that everyone at the event shared a determination to ensure that all aspects of the build environment, including data centre services, were able to achieve the necessary balance of operational efficiency.

It was also great to meet up with the wider Loughborough University students and staff, and to see some of the investments they have been making in their Training and Research labs – especially their Built Environment Training Academy (BETA) initiative. Across many of the University departments there was a key theme which is close the EkkoSense ethos – utilising 3D, immersive digital twin technology. Many disciplines I saw, refrigeration, engineering, construction, geospatial, teaching and many more have also invested in digital twin technology to improve efficiency. When we collect more and more digital data it is imperative that is presented in a clear, immersive and 3D software to truly bring the data to life.

EkkoSense has always been a strong supporter of ASHRAE guidelines and the organisation’s work. We were delighted to share our perspective on current and future data centre optimisation best practice with present industry colleagues. Our presentation set out how our EkkoSoft Critical and EkkoSim solutions can and have played a key role in accelerating the journey towards Net Zero Data Centres.

We also discussed how the traditional data centre workload is transforming with the advent of AI compute loads. We explained how AI is placing an increased premium on real-time data centre visibility, and also outlined how data centre operations teams need to answer key engineering questions before deploying liquid cooling in their facilities.

Thanks to the UK ASHRAE Chapter for the invitation to the event, and also to the rest of the ASHRAE guidelines team and their president M. Dennis Knight for a great event, with special thanks to Prof Mahroo Eftekhari for bringing it all together. It was made even better with EkkoSense winning an ASHRAE 2025 Technology Award for our work in optimising data centre performance!

One of the demonstrations of 3D technology at the ASHRAE UK Chapter Building Services Exhibition at Loughborough University