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Collaboration can't stay internal: Why IT needs to talk to architects

Unregulated load - most of it belonging to IT - can account for as much as 40% of a building's power draw

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Unregulated load - most of it belonging to IT - can account for as much as 40% of a building's power draw

IT teams aren’t normally involved in building design, but is doing so important for the planet?

Regulation and legislation can be effective tools in the fight against climate change. Heavy-handed, perhaps, and often applied with more speed than thought, but in the years before being green became 'cool', governments did more for the climate than capitalists.

The UK's building regulations are one example: specifically Part L, relating to the conservation and efficiency of fuel and power. Like many other regulations, they're well-meaning but fail to capture the whole picture.

"We don't actually, at this moment in time, have to consider the 'things' we put into a building," says Chris Grundy, technology group leader at ME Engineers. "So, the heating and the cooling [and other fixed systems] are regulated load. The unregulated load is everything else, from your PCs, your laptops, your phones, your Wi-Fi points, your equipment in your IT equipment rooms, your printers.

"That's quite a significant proportion of the actual energy consumption of a building."

Fixed systems consume a huge amount of power, but on average only 60 to 65% of a building's total; a large proportion of the rest, known as process load - effectively 'everything that plugs into the wall' - falls under IT's purview.

Take data centres as an example. With the right (regulated) cooling technologies, a data centre can look very efficient on paper - but the servers themselves are part of the unregulated process load, leaving the building owners free to use cheap, inefficient units without penalty.

"We feel that by only tackling 60% of the problem [on average], we're kind of leaving behind the 40%," says Grundy.

The issue, says Mohamed Mekkawy, senior building physics engineer at ME Engineers, is that technology equipment and energy use in general are not regulated in the same way as fixed systems, which makes it difficult to establish a comprehensive baseline to assess sustainability or carbon savings.

In the data centre example above, "there's no benchmark giving clients and developers a sense of what constitutes a high energy consuming data centre compared to an efficient one for the same processing capacity," he says.

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Collaboration can't stay internal: Why IT needs to talk to architects

IT teams aren’t normally involved in building design, but is doing so important for the planet?

Today, energy use is largely governed by self-regulation: a company or building owner will say, 'I expect this to be the base load of my equipment'. They can then base future calculations - including around energy- and carbon-saving - on that assumption. Naturally, these calculations are difficult to challenge.

Bringing together IT and building designers at the planning stages can alleviate this issue, helping the latter understand the true load inside the building and tune it for higher efficiency. Grundy says that, without entering into a proper dialogue with IT, designers are at best "just making a guess."

"By better understanding their [IT's] requirements and reducing their carbon footprint, the building can reduce its carbon footprint as well... If you've got equipment rooms, they're not going to be occupied by people, they're going to be occupied by machines, so they can run hot - they can run at 30° if the IT team have bought the right equipment. Is there a policy to turn off all your screens after a few seconds, if they're not being used?"

These solutions are relatively simple but have a real impact - and the power (and money) saving only grows as the organisation scales up.

But sustainability isn't all about energy. As Grundy puts it, "Energy is energy. Sustainability is a whole lifecycle."

To go fully green, which should be as much of a business imperative today as digital transformation was five years ago, managers must perform full end-to-end assessments of their business. This requires the full collaboration of every department, from early designers to procurement, IT, clients and the up- and downstream supply chains.

It's not an easy task - there's a lot of data to collect and analyse - but it's being done for the right reasons: that data makes it easy to benchmark your department and whole business, and then start to make improvements.

Despite the short-term pain, the work is necessary and the demand exists. Mekkawy says "one hundred per cent" of the clients he's talked to over the last two years have asked about sustainability and energy efficiency.

"We have to care now more than ever, because it's not a luxury and a privilege and value-added addition to projects anymore; it's now an essential part. So, when we have a request for proposal, a big part of it is talking about what you can offer the client in terms of sustainability and energy efficiency, and now we are going to the whole lifecycle assessment...

"The thing is now, we should care. We have to care, because it's not only an ethical obligation as a corporation. It's now something required by clients as an integral and essential part of their proposals and of their requirements."