Power Vendors Step Up To Put Sustainability Front And Center

As the use of AI and GenAI continues to explode, issues around power consumption have become a hot topic.

As businesses’ use of AI and GenAI continues to explode, issues around power consumption, a key component of any company’s sustainability concerns, have become a hot topic.

In the face of that shift, a number of power management vendors are helping solution providers up their sustainability IQ and assist customers with reducing electricity and power consumption costs.

Schneider Electric, the $40 billion Rueil-Malmaison, France-based global power and cooling behemoth, has created a Sustainability School to help partners and its own employees monetize sustainability and reduce power consumption in the AI era.

“They learn all about sustainability, including some of the terminology in the market such as Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 [carbon emissions],” said Vice President of U.S. Channels Gordon Lord. “These are things that I would say historically have been outside IT discussions. But now companies have sustainability officers who sit at the executive table. The sustainability officer is talking to the CEO, and they’re talking to the CFO about what the company is doing internally to meet some of their sustainability targets as well as what they are doing with customers.”

While increasingly power-efficient data center infrastructure equipment has helped reduce power consumption, AI and GenAI have started to flip that equation.

Goldman Sachs, the $49.25 billion investment banking firm, earlier this year reported that energy efficiency gains in the data center have dwindled since 2020 while AI innovations have led to a significant boost in energy use.

Goldman Sachs estimated that AI will cause an increase in data center power consumption of about 200 terawatt-hours per year between 2023 and 2030, and that AI will account for about 19 percent of data center power use.

The International Energy Agency, which works with countries across the globe to shape energy policies, has said a single ChatGPT query uses 2.9 watt-hours of electricity versus 0.3 watt-hours for a Google search.

Schneider Electric’s sustainability strategy includes providing software to help customers and its solution providers track energy usage to provide insight into what emissions or power consumption can be expected from Schneider Electric products, said Lord.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface with our partners in terms of our transformation from being primarily a hardware vendor to being a hardware, software and services vendor,” Lord told CRN. “And we’re spending a lot of time with our partners around our EcoStruxure platform to show how they can drive recurring revenue and how that ties into the sustainability and efficiency story.”

Schneider Electric is also designating certain products with a green premium label that shows the packaging uses environmentally conscious materials in addition to being power-efficient, Lord said.

“Customers can know and trust that that sustainability and the environment were top of mind when these products were being packaged and developed,” he said.

Meanwhile, Dublin, Ireland-based Eaton, the $23.2 billion power management company, has made sustainability a top priority, said Eaton Vice President of Distributed Infrastructure Sales Steve Loeb.

Some of Eaton’s UPSes now not only take power from the electric grid to power data centers but can send power back to the grid from their batteries during off-peak data center power use, Loeb said.

“These UPSes allow for bi-directional power flow, which can then support renewable resources and offset the cost of infrastructure upgrades, things like that, by earning revenue through frequency response and balancing the grid during peak load times,” he said. “If you think about utilization during the 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. window in most major metro areas, you see spikes in when people get home from work and are consuming energy at home. Conceptually, data centers maybe won’t consume as much power then and can start feeding power back into the grid to help normalize power consumption to municipalities in exchange for credits and rebates.”

Recycled Materials, Reused Products Are Key

Eaton product managers and engineering teams are sharply focused on sustainability and reducing the carbon footprint with the design of the company’s products, said Loeb. That includes using recyclable material and more sustainable shipping, he said.

“We have looked at the way that we package our PDUs, as an example,” he said. “These are long devices that were traditionally shipped on wide pallets, which takes up a lot of space in containers. We have started shipping them vertically so you can fit many more in a smaller footprint, more into a container, and ship those so you’re having fewer container loads.”

For Limoges, France-based data center power management equipment developer Legrand, designing products with postconsumer recycled material or material that can be easily

refurbished, reused or recycled is important, said Marc Cram, director of new market development for the company’s data, power and control division.

On the energy consumption front, Legrand is embedding intelligence into its products, including overhead power busways, racks and cabinets, power distribution units and rear door heat exchangers, Cram said.

“Our ability to embed intelligence within any part of that chain that will enable remote management, remote monitoring and the integration of temperature and humidity readings gives a degree of granularity of control to help customers determine,

‘Do I have stranded power? Do I have power capacity available that I am losing for whatever reason, perhaps due to a phase imbalance?’” he said.

Solution providers can build a service based on that intelligence by offering remote monitoring as a service for their end customers, in addition to what they make from installation and integration, Cram said.

“We’re always trying to define something that enables our partners to be participating in the greening of our end customers and finding ways to help them either maximize their utilization, reduce their utilization or operate at the optimum temperature range with the minuscule degree of margin for error,” he said.

“For instance, we can support even smart load shedding should the customer’s rack get within a degree of 60 degrees Celsius, the upper range they’re targeting in the hot aisle, and help them stay there.”

The Impact Of AI On Sustainability

Pretty much every organization is looking at implementing AI in their data centers, starting out with a small project but quickly realizing they don’t have the resources to scale it, said Todd Pekats, executive vice president and chief security officer at Myriad360, a West Deptford, N.J.-based solution provider.

“So do you look at GPU as a service, which is becoming more and more of a discussion, or do you want to control, manage and secure your own environment?” Pekats told CRN.

“Maybe you don’t want to use the as-a-service model, either traversing the public network or working in a shared environment. You may have regulatory compliance. You may have internal regulatory drivers saying you don’t want your data going outside or don’t want processing outside the confines of what you control. So it becomes a rather complicated question of, ‘What can I do with what I have? How much will it take to go and change that?’

And then you have availability of equipment, availability of space and, even more challenging, availability of power.”

Before AI took off, there was a focused effort on sustainability, but AI is now sharpening that focus for businesses, said Brendan Walsh, principal of ESG at St. Louis-based solution provider World Wide Technology.

“Businesses are saying, ‘Hey, we’re probably going to double our energy consumption,” Walsh told CRN.

What’s more, he said, businesses are more often saying they have a science-based emission or energy reduction target or a net-zero target.

“Given that the data center is a significant energy consumer, those businesses typically are seeing that they basically have to do their fair share in terms of energy reduction,” Walsh said. “At the same time, more recently, you’ve got the AI boom, which is driving energy consumption in the other direction.”