Ian is a Chartered Engineer with more than 50 years in engineering including 30 years’ experience in data-centre power and cooling, formerly CTO for Emerson Network Power in EMEA and Visiting Professor to the University of Leeds, and now principal at Critical Facilities Consulting.

An active blogger, trainer, author of many technical papers on critical power and cooling with presentations and keynote speeches made around the world, Ian is a Fellow of the IET and Member of CIBSE. In the past decade Ian has been Technical Chair of the Data Centre Council of techUK, Chair of the DCSG of the BCS, Accredited Tier Designer of the Uptime Institute and ex-Chair of the Technical Working Group in EMEA for The Green Grid.

In addition, Ian sits on data-centre standards committees and bodies, including as an Expert Member of TCT/7 – EN50600, Data Centre Infrastructure, Expert Member of ISO/IEC JCT1 SC39 WG1 ‘Resource Efficient Data Centres’, Project Editor of ISO/IEC 30134-1 and a member of BSI Committee IST/046 ‘Sustainability for, and by ICT’ and was awarded ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Data Centre Industry’ at both Data Centres Europe in 2009 and DatacenterDynamics EMEA in 2015.

Practices are increasingly thinking about sustainability, but how do you reduce your digital carbon footprint while continuing to be as efficient as possible in data storage and use of technology?  Although the energy needed for a single internet search or email is small, those scraps of energy, and the associated greenhouse gases emitted with each online activity, can add up. The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to some estimates. It is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally… and we are talking pre Covid air travel, not 2020!  Ian Bitterlin, a Former Visiting Professor at Leeds University, knows a thing or two about data and shares some tips for greening up your technology.