How to scale your IT without using more power

Digitalization is on the rise in every company—including yours. Processes are becoming smarter, faster, and more efficient thanks to automation and, increasingly, AI. This brings many benefits, but it comes at a cost: your IT systems are consuming more power. And that’s precisely where a problem is emerging in the Netherlands—one that will only grow in the coming years.

The limits of the power grid are no longer theoretical. They have become practical. Visible. Painfully visible. An Australian company has even filed a lawsuit against TenneT to get a new data center connected. Not for next month, not for next year, but for 2029, when that data center is supposed to be operational. The response: connection isn’t expected until around 2035.

Let that sink in for a moment. Anyone who needs extra grid capacity today may, in practice, face waiting times of many years. This doesn’t just affect hyperscalers and data centers. Companies looking to expand, become more sustainable, or accelerate their digital ambitions are hitting the same wall. And you’re already noticing it even at the local level: requesting a higher-capacity connection is no longer a given. Space on the high-voltage grid and on regional grids is running out. And expansion takes time. A lot of time.

This has important implications for every CEO, CIO, and IT manager: you can no longer view your company’s growth in isolation from your IT’s energy consumption. Demanding more digital capacity without considering power usage is the same mistake as wanting to double the size of a distribution center without checking whether the access road can handle that traffic.

In this blog, I’ll share my vision for a more practical path. Not by waiting for extra capacity, but by first identifying where your IT actually consumes power, where the major consumers are, and how much waste is hidden unnoticed in your environment. Because in many organizations, there’s still a surprising amount of room for growth within the existing connection. Sometimes even with less power than today.

IT growth starts with understanding consumption

For years, power consumption within IT was hardly a topic of discussion. Servers ran, storage grew, applications became more demanding, and if the connection became too small, you simply requested a larger one. That was annoying, but rarely a strategic problem. That reality has disappeared.

Today, extra capacity is not readily available in many places. Upgrading a connection or requesting a new one for an additional branch, production site, or data center often takes so long that it directly impacts your growth plans. Not because your business sees no opportunities, but because the physical infrastructure is lacking to support that growth.

At the same time, electricity costs have risen sharply. In many organizations, the energy bill hasn’t just gone up a little; it has started to weigh more heavily on operations. That suddenly turns an old blind spot into a management issue. Because as soon as power becomes both scarce and expensive, you want to know where that capacity is going and what it actually delivers.

That’s where the real work begins. Not with the total meter reading on the bill, but in the details of your IT landscape. Which servers consume the most power? Which storage platforms are quietly eating up capacity? Which workloads, transactions, processes, or users cause spikes? And just as important: which parts of your environment use a lot of power without delivering commensurate business value?

This is exactly where things go wrong in many organizations. Because IT energy consumption wasn’t a limiting factor for years, almost no one has a clear understanding of the biggest consumers within their digital environment. Not at the server level, not at the workload level, and certainly not in relation to business value.

That insight is now indispensable. Those who know where consumption comes from can optimize in a targeted manner. Then growth no longer automatically translates to more power, more costs, and more dependence on a grid that is already under pressure. Then you can let your IT grow along with your business, within the connection you already have. And in some cases, even with lower consumption than today.

Why more efficient hardware doesn’t deliver enough

The reaction is predictable. When power becomes a limiting factor, an obvious solution is on the table: buy more energy-efficient hardware. After all, new servers are more efficient than old ones. And that’s true. If you run exactly the same workloads on newer hardware, you’ll generally use less power on balance.

But that’s rarely enough.

The problem isn’t that hardware isn’t becoming more efficient. The problem is that the demand for digital capacity is growing much faster than those efficiency gains can keep up with. Organizations are running more applications, processing more data, automating more processes, and adding AI to environments that are already under increasing strain. A more energy-efficient server does help, but not enough to accommodate the structural growth.

There’s also a practical consideration. You typically don’t replace hardware every year, but once every five to seven years. That’s when you make an efficiency upgrade. Not in between. Anyone who thinks this can be solved by replacing equipment much more frequently will run up against the reality of budgets. Renewing everything annually is rarely financially attractive, and the benefits of such a small interim upgrade are usually limited.

The reference to Moore’s Law doesn’t help much here either. That law was never about energy efficiency. Gordon Moore made an observation about the growth in the number of transistors on chips. That is different from performance per watt. Moreover, chip manufacturers have been running into physical limits for years, making efficiency gains increasingly less spectacular. Hardware is still improving, but not at a pace that automatically keeps up with your growth.

You see this everywhere. Despite more energy-efficient hardware, total IT energy consumption is still rising. Not because manufacturers are failing, but because the use of IT is growing faster than the efficiency of the underlying technology.

So anyone who thinks new hardware solves this problem is looking at it too narrowly. More efficient hardware helps, but is at most part of the solution. The real gains lie elsewhere: knowing which workloads, systems, and usage patterns demand unnecessary capacity, and targeting them specifically.

This is how you create room for growth without extra power

If you look only at the total power consumption of IT, you mainly see a final figure. If you zoom in, you see where the real opportunities lie. Then it becomes clear which workloads are unnecessarily heavy, which processes cause spikes, and where capacity is being wasted without delivering any additional business value.

That is exactly where the room to maneuver lies. Not by pushing harder on your connection, but by managing what you already have more intelligently. By planning workloads better. By reducing peak loads. By linking consumption to users, transactions, and business processes. Then you can grow without your power consumption automatically increasing along with it.

Sciante helps you uncover that insight. Not through abstract dashboards, but through concrete answers to a practical question: where is your capacity leaking away, and what can you do about it?

Want to know how much untapped potential is still hidden in your IT? Then schedule a no-obligation appointment with me. Together, we’ll identify where you can optimize, so your IT can continue to grow without your power supply holding you back.