Has your corporate energy team knocked on your data centre operations door yet?

News of the fire in Kent that has temporarily shut down the 2GW capacity IFA UK Interconnector electricity cable between the UK and France has had an immediate impact, with UK electricity prices rising by 19% to £475 per megawatt hour (MWh). As a net importer of electricity, any disruption to the UK’s external power connectors is clearly of concern.

This interruption has also happened at a time when UK wind energy production is very low, with generation for the last month only supporting around 3% of the country’s electricity demand. Not surprisingly, this has led some politicians to call for greater national resilience based on a more reliable UK generating capacity.

National Grid expects half the capacity of the IFA cable to remain unavailable until March next year, so power supply is likely to remain an issue for the next six months at least. Given that the country currently has little alternative to make up this shortfall except through the increased use of fossil fuels, there’s going to be a renewed call for reduced energy consumption – particularly from those organisations already committed to ambitious net zero targets.

Expect data centres to come under renewed pressure as one of the highest energy users within organisations. And while data centre teams clearly want to deliver on their carbon obligations, that can be challenging when they don’t always have a clear understanding of how exactly their rooms are performing from a cooling, capacity and power perspective.

The good news, however, is that there’s lots you can do. When EkkoSense conducted research analysing the actual cooling performance of some 133 data centre halls earlier this year, we found that operations are missing out on proven ways of cutting cooling energy consumption by up to 30% using the latest software-based optimisation approaches.

So if your corporate energy team is already knocking on your door, contact myself [email protected]  visit www.ekkosense.com/demo and you could quickly be giving them the answers they’re looking for…