Strategies for Optimized Energy Usage Efficiency in Data Centers

Annually U.S. commercial and industrial buildings spend $400 billion in energy costs and $120 million in unused energy. A mere 10% reduction can save up to $40 billion in annual energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to 49 million motor vehicles. Data centers “are estimated to be responsible for up to 3% of global electricity consumption today and are projected to touch 4% by 2030.” With rising energy costs, it’s a timely concern for data center

operators/managers to have solutions to reduce energy costs.

A chilled water plant is typically considered the largest “energy consumer” within any building or facility. A 10 to 20% reduction in energy use for a large data center can translate into $1 million annual energy savings. In a small critical facility, the savings could be nearly $500,000.

The panel of presenters will offer insight into how facility owners and operators can leverage data collection platforms to save energy, reduce carbon emissions, and enhance building sustainability and performance. As the platforms monitor all equipment, sensors, and devices–gather, and normalize data into cohesive dashboards to improve operations, and

productivity, minimize energy spend, and reduce expenses–while enabling remote troubleshooting and triage. Retail, wholesale, or enterprise data centers integrating these platforms can use existing technology to gather real-time information.

Using a subsection of the data from the data collection platforms which typically are a combination of SCADA, BMS, and DCIM solutions–which aggregate, normalize, and store long-term historical data–operators can model the chilled water plant system and develop a set of facility control adjustments that can help maximize energy savings. Eliminating new hardware installations or a live cloud connection to the site helps avoid time-consuming approvals for on-site contractors and mandatory cybersecurity measures that delay savings.

Focusing purely on the interior of a plant room, the panelists will provide actionable tasks to help operators/managers determine how:

·  Slight alterations to chillers and cooling towers’ performance can best be balanced.

·  They can review a combination of equipment to determine the low point in energy usage–where the system can produce the same levels of chilled water, at

the same temperature while using less energy in the plant room.

· Eliminating human data collection delays, operators can use an analytics platform to obtain real-time data instantly and model their energy reduction actions to jumpstart energy savings. Ultimately, facility operators/managers must be aware that long-term data collection is central to the success of optimized energy usage efficiency across their critical facilities.