Whether or not artificial intelligence will be a force for bad or good is being hotly contested in the public forum, and that extends to its climate impact. AI requires enormous power consumption, putting further strain on the environment.

Bit in its partnership with Danish company, Danfoss A/S, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is trying to save energy for the bottom line and the planet.

HPE’s Sue Preston and Danfoss’ Sune Baastrup discuss their sustainability strategy.

“It’s going to take everybody to come together from an ecosystem point of view … we need AI in order to do the research and look at all of the innovation that can be driven,” said Sue Preston (pictured, right), vice president of worldwide advisory and professional services for HPE global sales at HPE. “We then have being sustainable when deploying the architecture and the infrastructure to drive that AI. There’s synergies between the technology areas that come together to make an impact because there is only one planet … how do you drive that message internally? How are you transforming the cultural shift for people?”

Preston and Sune Baastrup (left), senior vice president and chief information officer of Danfoss, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight at HPE Discover, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed strategies for reducing energy consumption and the importance of thinking about technology’s climate impact. (* Disclosure below.)

Lowering power consumption through heat recovery

In its collaboration with HPE, Danfoss has managed to reduce power consumption by 50%, by reducing and reusing energy, according to Baastrup. The company focuses on decarbonizing manufacturing and engineering industries.

“It’s not about reducing the workload … it’s about reducing the energy consumption,” he said. “We put electricity into the data centers. What comes out [of] the waste product is heat. We want to reuse that energy; we want to capture that heat. That’s the other part that we have co-innovated on so that we have heat recovery stations.”

Danfoss and HPE use a modular approach, where the heat recovery stations increase in value when kept in close proximity to the places where the energy can be reused. Preston cites a social value case where the excess heat from Bristol University campus went toward nearby housing.

“The cheapest energy is the energy we don’t use. And you can say that the greenest energy is the energy that we reuse,” Baastrup said. “Let’s take the opportunity to make sure that we really capture on the business impact of AI. We should not slow down on that journey. That’s not the message. The message is that the energy that goes into those systems, we should be obliged to reuse.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of HPE Discover: 

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Intel Corp., the primary sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE