Companies are needlessly wasting a lot of money and space in their central offices and data centers due to energy-inefficient architectures and keeping equipment they really don’t need. That’s the word from Jakob Carnemark, CEO of Aligned Energy.

Most businesses today spend around $1 per kiloWatt hour powering and cooling their equipment, Carnemark said. But with more efficient data center architectures, he said, they could bring it down to the 25 to 30 cents per kiloWatt hour range.

Given growing uptake in cloud services, which create greater variability in energy usage, now is a great time for network operators to take a look at how they can make their facilities more cost- and energy-efficient, said Carnemark. That’s because traditional chiller plants don’t like variable loads, and Aligned Energy has developed a solution that is stable and efficient with variable loads.

Aligned Energy, which was established in 2010, has three divisions.

Its Energy Metrics Division provides software to enable businesses to look at their applications and correlate the energy required to support them. It provides all that information via a single pane of glass. Royal Bank of Canada is among the customers of Energy Metrics.

Aligned Energy’s Inertech division is focused on new electrical and mechanical technologies. In 2010 the company patented Conductive Cooling, which lowers data center energy use for cooling by 90 percent and for water by 85 percent. Several large telcos, banks, and other organizations are now using this solution, which consists of a heat sync edge device at the rack, and a thermal hub that replaces a traditional thermal plant/chiller. Carnemark said users can deploy the chiller in a modular way as needed, adjusting for density rather than overbuilding or guessing about what they’ll need.

Karbon is the name of Aligned Energy’s professional services division. It does data center design to drive improvement based on feedback loop information Aligned Energy collects with its Energy Metric platform. That way, the company can design systems, see how they perform, and improve upon them.

Aligned Energy is working with GENBAND (News - Alert) on a central office transformation initiative, which will allow telcos to install power and cooling so they end up with smaller footprints when they move from the PSTN to IP, Carnemark explained. Telcos as a result will realize significant savings both on energy use and on expensive real estate, he said.