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Technology Now

Are we going to run out of power?

23 Apr 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

1.111 - 2.072 Sam Jarrell

Good morning, Michael.

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2.373 - 4.496 Michael Bird

Good morning, Sam. How are you doing?

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4.817 - 6.68 Sam Jarrell

I am doing all right now that I have some coffee.

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7.681 - 16.715 Michael Bird

Okay. Now, Sam, as always, I have a question for you. Do you think you could go without mains electricity for one day? Go full analog, if you will.

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16.735 - 23.946 Sam Jarrell

For a day? Yes. For like multiple weeks? Absolutely not. What about you? Do you think you could do it?

23.993 - 40.095 Michael Bird

Well, I live in very rural England, so I get power cuts quite a lot. Like a horse sort of sits on a power line or like a tractor knocks over a power line or something. It happens all the time. So I have actually gone without power for 24 hours. I think I probably could. I think it'd be quite nice, actually, if I had a bit of notice.

40.736 - 54.479 Michael Bird

Anyway, you or I might not have to live without electricity ourselves, but with humanity's ever increasing demands for the stuff, working out how to budget effectively and get the most out of what we have is becoming more important than ever. I'm Michael Bird.

54.881 - 55.645 Sam Jarrell

I'm Sam Jarrell.

55.946 - 58.962 Michael Bird

And welcome to Technology Now from HPU.

Chapter 2: How does energy consumption impact organizations?

352.333 - 364.133 Karim Abou Zahab

And most of the AI deployments actually do not go and see production. And that is something that could be mitigated if we think in terms of efficiency from the design perspective.

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364.453 - 371.085 Michael Bird

So there's an efficiency conversation there with regards to building data centers. Is there enough energy to go around? Very good question.

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371.365 - 398.166 Karim Abou Zahab

Never. So basically in the current economy, there needs to be limitless growth, right? And energy as of now is not able to keep up with the demands of multiple industries. And when we're thinking about energy, we need to think about energy generation because that's the use of resources that we can allocate somewhere else. And again, this is where we actually think of

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398.146 - 421.47 Karim Abou Zahab

What if there is not enough energy? So the wait times in order to jump on the grid to get electricity for data centers are huge. The wait times to get to renewable energy are even larger. So the question is, what can I do with the current capacity that I'm either given or currently have? And the answer is utilize it more efficiently.

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421.45 - 434.906 Michael Bird

And I guess the interesting thing about data centers is that, you know, sort of viewed more and more as national critical infrastructure. So from an energy perspective, is keeping data centers powered similar to keeping up our comms networks and hospitals and things like that?

435.426 - 454.209 Karim Abou Zahab

I'm going to just give you an example of something that happened in the past year actually in Spain. And we saw that there was a power cutoff throughout the country. And a lot of services that were deemed previously critical were shut down, such as public transportation. So suddenly there was no public transportation anymore in Spain.

454.85 - 467.667 Karim Abou Zahab

So we cannot really say that data centers are on par with critical hospital services, so to speak. But what is actually inside of a hospital... an actual data center.

468.048 - 493.847 Karim Abou Zahab

So almost every single hospital in the world now has a data center, has an IT department that is responsible for managing and operating the hospital, including what the patients have received also have been going through, basically their diagnostic. And hence, certain parts of the IT infrastructure or the IT estate have to be deemed critical by governments or organizations.

493.827 - 503.12 Michael Bird

Okay, so that leads quite nicely onto energy sovereignty, because different countries get their energy from different locations. Can you define what we mean by sovereignty?

Chapter 3: Why is energy sovereignty becoming increasingly important?

735.531 - 758.022 Karim Abou Zahab

However, if you have a race car and you're using it in traffic in London, for example, that race car isn't going anywhere and it's burning a lot of energy in order to stay where it is. And that is exactly how IT is nowadays in a lot of places around the world. And that is one of the conversations that we also have with our customers in the sustainable transformation team.

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758.383 - 778.157 Karim Abou Zahab

And we actually devised a way for our customers to track, to look at efficiency from a broader IT perspective. And this is what we call the five IT efficiency levers. And these levers are equipment efficiency, software efficiency, data efficiency, energy, and resource efficiency.

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778.137 - 783.445 Michael Bird

So what are some ways that organizations could use the energy that they have more efficiently?

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783.905 - 805.455 Karim Abou Zahab

Right. After I'm done with optimizing the equipment, making sure that the data is efficient and my software is efficient, I can look at the auxiliary resources that I'm utilizing in order to run my IT estate. This is where HPE has a lot of different things that we can help our customers in order to increase the efficiency of how they use that energy. Direct liquid cooling is one of them.

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805.475 - 825.514 Karim Abou Zahab

And not only that, but we're also having a lot of deployments that are around heat reuse. And usually we look at it as a byproduct of running that data center. But as we know, heat is actually a very valuable asset in a lot of countries, whether I can use it to reheat a district pool or I can use it even for a brewery, for example.

826.194 - 836.125 Karim Abou Zahab

And this is why we're trying more and more to optimize across the five levers, because Energy will always be a finite resource.

836.886 - 844.998 Michael Bird

So thinking about businesses and organizations and governments and us as citizens, like whose responsibility is power usage?

845.018 - 863.966 Karim Abou Zahab

When we're talking about energy, it is all of our responsibilities, right? Like even as individuals, you know? But in terms of the question that you asked, whose responsibility is it? It is everyone across that chain. So we're talking that governments are implementing efficiency measures. Governments need to regulate the use of energy.

863.986 - 883.301 Karim Abou Zahab

And we're seeing that in the EU with the Energy Efficiency Directive, as well as organizations. And it's... In organizations, if we zoom into the energy use of IT, this is where there's a bit of a disconnect that happens. Because IT teams usually are not the ones that pay the energy bill. That's actually the facilities that do that.

Chapter 4: What are the financial benefits of efficient energy use?

1266.642 - 1267.363 Sam Jarrell

Bye, y'all.

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