ENERGY & POWER
DEMAND EQUALS INNOVATION
Laurie McKelvie, Technical Delivery Lead, IES
The 2025 Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy identified sustainability and emissions intensity as key criteria for data centre leaders when choosing power technology, noting that they must adhere to corporate sustainability commitments. Similarly, the Uptime Institute’ s 2025 AI Infrastructure Survey found that power availability is now one of the top three factors influencing where new AI infrastructure is built, directly linking the challenge of sourcing clean, reliable power to core business strategy.
This pressure is fueling not only massive clean energy procurement but also significant innovation.
Google, for instance, managed to reduce its data centre energy emissions by 12 % in 2024, even as its electricity consumption soared by 27 % due to AI-driven growth, demonstrating a successful decoupling of emissions from expansion.
“ Innovation shows up first as efficiency you can prove,” says Laurie McKelvie, Technical Delivery Lead at Integrated Environmental Solutions( IES).
“ Operators should benchmark and simulate Power Usage Effectiveness( PUE) and Carbon Usage Effectiveness( CUE), then use low-cost operational fixes – sensor QA / QC, set-point and scheduling optimisation, out-of-range and fault detection – before capital expenditure.
“ From there,‘ retrofit optioneering’ uses the twin as a virtual testbed to de-risk deeper measures and verify savings against a live baseline via dashboards tracking KPIs from PUE and CUE to airflow and HVAC effectiveness.”