When I was charged with the task of looking at the energy use of two data centers in the Boston metro area for Staples as an EDF Climate Corps fellow, two things came to mind immediately. The first was that I knew that data centers were unruly hogs of energy use and IT organizations had only just put together the standards of how to control them. The second was that I hadn’t ever stepped foot within a data center facility, and I needed to get my homework done well in advance to effectively tackle the project. Being an old efficiency consultant on projects ranging from financial services to the automotive manufacturing sector, I wasn’t too worried with applying the methodology I had learned in the past. The challenge this time was to tame the data center beast that had started to really plague the operations of Staples, and set them on the path to keep it in check going forward. Taking a practical, holistic, systems thinking approach, I wanted to limit the scope of the project to what could be done with the data centers as they stand today versus what are some of the strategic discussions Staples should have around the future of their data centers overall. In the end, recommendations were given for short-term airflow, HVAC, monitoring and lighting fixes that would produce annual cost savings of $395,870, reduce the amount of kWh used by 2,839,467 and eliminate 2,038 metric tons of CO2. However, I still wanted to keep Staples focused on some of the best-in-class scenarios that could push them into innovating within the space in the long-term.

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