THOUGHT LEADER
In a light intervention – that doesn ’ t require that much investment relative to other possibilities – automation , AI , measuring and controlling have a significant impact . We can reduce 18.7kg of carbon dioxide per year , per square metre by 8.4 , just by automating and applying AI to make a building run more efficiently .
Digital technologies make a building run much more efficiently .
Microgrids A microgrid is effectively distributed energy resources that can island off of a grid . It can be small or large , it could be a solar array in batteries , or it could be a very large campus that uses massive solar implementation , battery energy storage systems , onboard hydrogen – all of which works as an intelligent system .
There are many benefits of a microgrid . You can get better economic performance because you can hedge against centralised fuel prices and go off grid when that makes sense . You can bring more reliable infrastructure because now you have additional sources of energy beyond what you ’ re getting from a utility provider . But most importantly for this conversation , it can be more sustainable because you ’ re onboarding green energy sources and then you ’ re deploying those as it makes most sense for your operations .
This obviously introduces a level of complexity into the management of a system . How do you know when to charge your batteries versus use energy from the grid directly ? What about
4 WATCH NOW
EcoDataCenter Utilises Sustainable Energy
potentially selling energy back to the grid when it makes most sense ? How do you understand the tariff management system ? Throughout all of that , how do you maintain resiliency knowing that at any time there could be an outage ? These decisions have to be made as you ’ re managing a microgrid and go beyond manual intervention – they require automated artificial intelligence to make your data centre run most effectively and , of course , most sustainably .
Microgrids are one example , but this is really the world that we ’ re entering with the modern grid , where the prosumer ( someone who produces and consumes ) needs to be managed along
110 February 2025