NNIT student identifies energy optimization leading to 12,6% electricity reduction – to be implemented across data centers

As part of his thesis at Copenhagen School of Engineering (Maskinmesterskolen), NNIT Operations Specialist Lucas Füssel has worked on a way to reduce energy consumption in one of NNIT’s data centers, 1P, in Bagsværd, Denmark. He identified that by just allowing a slight increase in the overall temperatures in the data halls, we can lower the energy consumption with 12,61% which leads to significant estimated savings at 240,497 MWh per year without compromising the quality of our operation.

The theory has already been verified by Data Center Manager, Peter Kristian Søgaard and will be implemented in all NNIT’s data centers leading to optimization saving a significant amount of energy without affecting the quality of the operations.

The clever work from Lucas Füssel and his thesis is in line with our sustainability strategy where we since 2020 have been monitoring our energy and carbon footprint which also led us to committing to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in 2022 to make sure our targets are ambitious and in line with the Paris Agreement.

“With the energy crisis in Europe, I found it relevant to focus on this in my thesis. As our main electricity consumption derives from the cooling systems in our data centers, I started analyzing the circumstances and discovered that by slightly increasing the temperatures in our data halls, we can lower our consumption significantly without affecting the quality of our operations.”  Lucas Füssel explains.

We are proud that our talented student employee has gone beyond his daily work and helped us find a way to optimize how we run our data centers and lower our energy consumption with 12,61% per year, which may not seem like a lot but as we are consuming a huge amount of electricity in the data centers, this change will definitely be something we will notice in our yearly numbers and have a significant impact on our carbon footprint.

Data in general comes with a large carbon price and we continuously work on improving our environmental and sustainable targets. All the NNIT datacenters run on renewable energy via certificates but this newfound and innovative way to reduce our energy consumption further shows how all our employees can inspire us to reach the sustainability goals we have set for the company.