As the drive towards net zero intensifies, Colin Dean, Managing Director of Socomec UK, explores how intelligent power management solutions are enabling data centre CIOs to optimise resource utilisation, reduce their environmental footprint and achieve ambitious sustainability goals without compromising performance.
There is mounting pressure on organisations across the UK and Europe to deliver against green targets and reduce their energy footprint, all while driving growth. This is no mean feat. According to PwC, although close to half of UK organisations have now committed to net zero by 2030 (a positive change, up from 28% in 2024), the majority (83%) expect their energy consumption to increase this year – with the impact of high energy costs seen as a key barrier impeding their ability to compete internationally.
Some sectors, such as data centres, are facing added pressure to comply with sustainability targets. The European Union’s Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) mandates that data centres over 500kW now report key energy efficiency metrics – demanding transparency and efficiency on a scale never seen before.
With sustainability now a boardroom metric, CIOs are expected to reconcile growth with cost-efficiency and lead from the infrastructure up – yet, energy itself can often be the most overlooked asset in their strategy. To cut back on energy wastage and improve sustainability, CIOs must treat power management as an integral part of their IT strategy.
Getting smarter about energy monitoring and management
When it comes to reducing energy costs, one of the biggest challenges is understanding where exactly energy is being consumed and consequently how to avoid wastage. CIOs can only improve what they measure, and they can only manage what they can see. But energy management is still a blind spot for many organisations, with usage data often fragmented across departments or wholly unavailable.
Gaining full visibility into energy consumption across the IT infrastructure can help CIOs identify baselines, detect irregularities, and track energy performance across all parts of the organisation. With the right insights, they can pinpoint which systems draw the most power during peak times and locate inefficient equipment or operating patterns. Intelligent energy monitoring tools today can provide granular insight into key energy performance indicators such as the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of data centre operations – enabling CIOs to make informed decisions to boost the efficiency of their infrastructures.
The rise of modular power solutions
Accuracy and agility are key operative words in the context of energy management – however, many organisations still rely on monolithic infrastructures that are difficult to operationalise and scale.
To future-proof operations, organisations are increasingly adopting modular solutions, which can be fully customised to adapt to fast-changing IT environments. Crucially, modern energy management systems can guarantee high accuracy along the entire power and energy measurement chain, not just on the level of individual power monitoring devices, current and voltage transformers and cables. Industry best practice now sets the benchmark at 0.5% system accuracy, meaning that the total measurement error across the entire chain does not exceed 0.5% of the actual value.
Modular architectures enable organisations to combine power monitoring, power quality and residual current monitoring under one interoperable ecosystem – reducing footprint while maximising reliability and scalability.
Istanbul Airport proves smart energy management is a high-flying idea
Istanbul Airport – one of Europe’s largest travel hubs, serving 90 million passengers each year is leading the way in energy management and sustainability in mission-critical infrastructure.
Effective energy management plays an essential role in improving the airport’s overall operational efficiency. Power supply disruptions can have catastrophic consequences and wreak havoc on operations such as scheduled maintenance or software updates. For this reason, the airport must ensure the resilience of mission-critical infrastructure, such as emergency systems, server rooms and communications.
To maintain safety and uninterrupted operations, Istanbul Airport has deployed a set of advanced power monitoring systems from Socomec to track consumption, get real-time alerts of any earth leakage faults and be able to anticipate outages. Coupled with this, the airport deployed 300 Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems to ensure reliability and resilience. This commitment to optimising energy efficiency not only ensures business continuity, but also contributes to the organisation’s carbon neutrality goals.
Optimising the injection of renewable energy
Integrating renewable energy sources can further enhance organisations’ sustainability efforts. Here, granular insight is key once again, since without accurate consumption monitoring, there is no way to correctly size renewables. What’s more, even with the right consumption data to hand, many green projects never take off due to grid constraints. This is where modern energy storage systems can make a difference.
Organisations can use energy storage to supplement the grid when capacity is high, thereby reducing congestion and even saving costs. Excess energy can also be used to charge systems overnight, when tariffs are lower, or feed batteries connected to EVs or solar power units – reducing energy billing and increasing capacity for green initiatives. In fact, smart charging through energy storage solutions can reduce energy peaks by as much as 40%.
Creating resilience today, achieving sustainability in the long run
Modular energy monitoring, measurement and management systems are key elements of resilient and efficient organisations today. Optimising energy usage is not just about avoiding price spikes and reducing overall carbon footprints, but also about creating capacity for continued innovation.
With PwC revealing that more than 80% of UK organisations expect to increase investment in energy management in the next 12 months, there is a strong incentive to treat energy as another product in the business – and ensure data-driven decisions are being made to drive progress forward.
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Colin Dean, MD, Socomec UK
