Every watt a data center spends on cooling fans and half-empty racks is a watt that never reaches a paying workload, and as storage and processing needs keep climbing worldwide, that waste has become one of the largest controllable costs a facility team faces. It also carries a real environmental price, since the electricity these facilities draw represents a significant share of global demand – which is exactly why energy optimisation has moved from a nice-to-have into a core operating priority for any organisation running or hosting a data center.

This program, delivered by Arab British Fellowship Training Academy, takes a hands-on route through the discipline: instead of starting from theory, it walks participants straight into the levers that actually move a facility’s energy bill – cooling design, power distribution, virtualisation, and measurement – before tying everything back to the standards and long-term strategy that keep those gains in place.

Who Should Attend?

• Data center and facility operations leaders responsible for keeping existing sites running efficiently, covering everything from server racks to HVAC and lighting.
• Design engineers and consultants involved in planning, building, or renovating data center facilities.
• IT staff who need to understand how their infrastructure choices drive the electricity bill, and how to reduce that impact.
• Energy and sustainability managers tasked with folding data center operations into a broader corporate efficiency or ESG strategy.

Knowledge and Benefits

• Pinpoint exactly where a facility’s energy budget is being wasted, from underused servers to inefficient cooling loops.
• Put proven efficiency technologies into practice – advanced cooling, virtualisation, and power management tools – rather than just knowing about them.
• Read and act on the metrics that matter, such as PUE and its related indicators, to track whether changes are actually working.
• Build a realistic roadmap for improving an existing facility’s energy performance, from quick wins to longer-term capacity planning.

Module 1: Why Data Center Energy Costs Keep Climbing

• Overview of what consumes power – servers, cooling systems, and power infrastructure – and why the issue keeps growing in importance.
• The role of underutilised servers, legacy equipment, and poor facility management practices in driving up costs.
• The environmental impact of excessive energy consumption and its link to sustainability goals.

Module 2: The Global Rulebook – Standards, Metrics, and the Business Case

• International energy efficiency standards and regulations affecting data centers, such as the EU Code of Conduct, Energy Star, and LEED.
• Understanding and calculating Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and related metrics such as DCiE, WUE, and energy per transaction.
• Building the financial and corporate social responsibility (CSR) case for energy optimisation.

Module 3: Designing Facilities for Efficiency from Day One

• Core design principles for energy-efficient data centers: layout, cooling, and power supply.
• The role of modular and scalable design in reducing energy waste.
• Optimising the physical layout and airflow management for cooling efficiency, with case studies of facilities that cut energy use this way.

Module 4: Cooling Strategy – From Hot-Aisle Containment to Liquid Cooling

• The role of cooling in the energy bill and best practices such as hot aisle/cold aisle containment.
• Free cooling and air-side economisation, including hybrid approaches suited to warmer climates.
• Liquid cooling as an alternative for high-density server environments, and its economic and environmental trade-offs against air cooling.

Module 5: Power Delivery, Capacity Planning, and Load Balancing

• Power distribution units (PDUs), power factor correction, and high-efficiency UPS systems.
• Best practices for load balancing and reducing electrical losses.
• Accurate capacity planning and dynamic load management to avoid energy spikes and waste.

Module 6: Measuring and Managing Energy in Real Time

• The role of Energy Management Systems (EMS) in real-time monitoring of consumption.
• Key features of an effective EMS, including data logging and reporting.
• Using EMS data to identify inefficiencies across the entire facility.

Module 7: Virtualisation, Cloud, and Smarter Workload Placement

• How virtualisation reduces the need for physical servers and cuts energy use.
• The energy efficiency benefits of cloud computing and shared, multi-tenant infrastructure, weighing private, public, and hybrid trade-offs.
• Automating resource allocation and using predictive analytics to match workloads to real demand.

Module 8: Upgrading What You Already Have – Retrofits and Renewable Integration

• Auditing an existing facility’s energy performance and building a practical improvement roadmap.
• Integrating renewable sources such as solar and wind, and assessing feasibility based on location and available resources.
• Hybrid systems that combine traditional and renewable power sources.

Module 9: Sustaining the Gains – Long-Term Energy Management

• Building a culture of continuous improvement within the data center team.
• Ongoing monitoring of energy efficiency and applying corrective actions when needed.
• Maintaining regulatory compliance and pursuing sustainability certifications such as LEED and ISO 50001.