Zayo is saving five million kilowatt hours of electricity a year at three of its US data centres – potentially reducing its expenditure by an annual $500,000.

The company is saving the power thanks to a building management system that makes the data centres, in Atlanta, New York and Dallas, Tier 3 compliant.

Zayo has worked with Fairbanks Energy Services on the project, said Jenny Gerson, its senior director of sustainability and strategy. “Fairbanks Energy has played an important role in helping us meet our energy savings and cost reduction goals in these three data centres. We look forward to continued collaboration on additional projects.”

The building management system integrates all of the power and cooling systems. Fairbanks installed heat exchangers, automated valves and new pumps. All of these changes were done live to the cooling system without any interruption or loss of redundancy, said the energy company.

CEO Adam Fairbanks said the work “is helping them meet their sustainability goals while reducing operating expenses and ensuring uptime, decreasing the likelihood of equipment failure.”

The energy efficiency impact of this site includes 4.4m kWh of savings. In addition to the efficiency benefits, the data centre was able to reclaim over 45% of stranded mechanical capacity and now has the ability to scale to over 150 watts per square foot.

Zayo claims the total annual saving is 5m kWh. Householders would pay around $600,000 a year for that at current US electricity retail prices.