MARKET PULSE: We recently caught up again with Matt Williams, principal engineer with LCI Consultants. He painted a picture of rising confidence in the industry but with new issues emerging in the challenge for sustainability.
The company kicked off about 16 years ago with a bunch of former staff from Basset Consulting that had been bought by AECOM, and it was now about 300 strong. Its portfolio includes a large tranche of hospitals, continuing work on the Atlassian building at Sydney’s Central Station precinct, and data centres, which is something that Williams says is a growing sustainability challenge.
Optimism is on the rise, he said. “It’s much busier now than it was. Earlier in the year we were a bit uncertain about what was going on, but I think there’s a general feeling that inflation is getting a bit under control and that there won’t be a lot more interest rate rises coming. I think it’s putting a bit more confidence back into the market.”
One sector that was particularly active was data centres. “We’re definitely looking for people.” But electrical engineers were “like gold dust,” he said, confirming recent stories we’ve run in The Fifth Estate’s Jobs and Biz sections.
Williams estimated there were about 10-15 data centres underway in each of the major cities in Australia; with his own company working on at least 10 in Australia and South-East Asia, primarily out of the Sydney office.
Key players are companies such as Google, Amazon and AirTrunk, which was recently bought by Blackstone in a $24 billion transaction.
But what needs a lot more attention from the industry is the amount of energy these energy guzzlers demand. This was something Williams was particularly concerned about.
“I did some numbers, and I reckoned that even one data centre was about 1 per cent of New South Wales’ energy consumption.”
The claim from the sector was that with the rise in renewable energy generation, “a balance was being achieved,” Williams said, but he was not so sure.
“So they’re balancing, they say, But I think the time of use of power is going to become critical. It’s all well and good building a load of solar farms to sort of manage that daytime load, but these data centres use that same energy at night.
“And that’s where the sustainability challenge comes in because there’s not a lot you can do to suddenly make a data centre use less energy. They use what they use.”
There was new technology to cool the racks, such as immersion cooling and air cooled systems.
“But the challenge for a sustainability person like myself is, no matter which way you do it, it’s just lots and lots of energy. It’s not something where one data centre would suddenly use half the energy of another data centre.
“Immersion does dramatically cut the ancillary energy, but the problem is the actual data management itself. The chip load is pretty much the same either way.”
We’ve heard that 20 per cent of our energy use will soon be in data centres, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence. Williams agrees.
To solve the problem, Google is looking into nuclear energy to power its needs, (something that The Fifth Estate trusts will stay off Australian shores) and other operators are looking at wind and pumped hydro, which would allow for cheap energy to be harvested during the day and sent to the centres at night.
Outside of data centres, Williams’ company continues to work on the Atlassian headquarters at Sydney’s Central Station precinct and also “a lot” in the hospital sector.
But while NABERS recently announced that a huge number of Victoria’s public hospitals had used its energy ratings, hospitals in NSW were yet to follow.
Williams says there are several factors at play. One was the structural issues. It was hard to get fair comparisons between hospitals with differing functions and specialisations. Another was that administrators might not actually like others knowing how much energy they use.
Another problem could be split incentive. In hospitals one department pays for the expenditure, or capex, and another is responsible for the operational expenditure, or opex. So there can be a reluctance to include good quality technology or design that pays back on operational costs over time and saves everyone in the long run, but costs more to implement.
But then that’s the eternal problem of so much of our built environment, and often the split incentive is not between departmental budgets but entire companies.
We didn’t remember to ask Williams about this during our chat, but as we put cyber pen to cyber paper (feeling a new awareness that we were adding to the data load in the so-called “cloud”) we remembered that clever people have offered solutions in the not so distant past.
For instance environmental upgrade agreements created plans for separate budgets to carry out environmental upgrades that would be paid for by savings on operational costs over a period of years, with benefits accruing to both parties.
Complications – some real, some enacted – plus cheap finance stymied these promising solutions from taking hold in a significant way.
But as with many great ideas that fail on their first iteration, it could be time to revisit.