Sustainable design and engineering consultancy Arcadis has announced the expansion of its data centre engineering solutions, deploying advanced cooling technologies, energy storage systems, and resource management frameworks to lower the environmental impact of digital infrastructure.
According to industry metrics, data centres can consume up to 50 times more electricity than commercial office buildings of equivalent scale, accounting for up to three per cent of global power consumption. Rising demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure has intensified focus on the environmental performance and power demands of these facilities.
Arcadis is integrating several technological frameworks across its project portfolio to address energy and resource intensity:
- Thermal and water optimisation: Aligning thermal management with American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) guidelines to widen equipment operating temperature bands, thereby reducing active cooling energy demands.
- Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS): Replacing traditional diesel backup generation with industrial battery storage to provide zero-emission power autonomy and grid balancing.
- Seawater cooling: Deploying coastal water cooling systems for mega-scale campuses, as implemented at the 1.2-gigawatt SINES DC project in Portugal, which operates on 100 per cent renewable power.
Isabel Rando, Head of Industry Solutions at Arcadis, stated that modern data centre design requires a systemic engineering approach that simultaneously resolves electrical grid interconnections, water supply constraints, and fibre network architecture.
Alongside technical design, Arcadis provides independent owner’s engineering services to oversee capital projects, managing technical risk, construction timelines, and safety compliance for hyperscale and co-location data centre developers globally.
