DCF Show: Traversing the Data Center Power Market with Legend Energy Advisors

The Legend Energy Advisors (Legend EA) vision of energy usage is one in which all companies have real-time visibility into related processes and factors such as equipment efficiency, labor intensity, and consumption of power and other energy resources across their operations.

During this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, the company's CEO and founder, Dan Crosby, and his associate, Ralph Rodriguez, RCDD, discussed the Legend Analytics platform, which offers commodity risk assessment infrastructure services, and real-time metering for energy usage and efficiency.

The firm contends that only through such "total transparency" will their clients be able to "radically impact" energy and resource consumption intensity at every stage of their businesses.

"My background was in construction and energy brokerage for a number of years before founding Legend," said Crosby. "The basis of it was helping customers understand how they're using energy, and how to use it better so that they can actually interact with markets more proactively and intelligently."

"That helps reduce your carbon footprint in the process," he added. "Our mantra is: it doesn't matter whether you're trying to save money or save the environment, you're going to do both of those things through efficiency -- which will also let you navigate markets more efficiently."

Legend EA's technology empowers the firm's clients to integrate all interrelated energy components of their businesses, while enabling clear, coherent communication across them.

This process drives transparency and accountability on “both sides of the meter,” as reckoned by the company, the better to eliminate physical and financial waste.

As stated on the firm's website, "This transparency drives change from the bottom up, enabling legitimate and demonstrable changes in enterprises’ environmental and financial sustainability."

Legend Analytics is offered as a software as a service (SaaS) platform, with consulting services tailored to the needs of individual customers, who include industrial firms and data center operators, in navigating the power market.

Additionally, the Ledge device, a network interface card (NIC), was recently introduced by Legend EA as a way to securely gather energy consumption data from any system in an organization and bring it to the cloud in real-time.

Here's a timeline of key points discussed on the podcast:

• 1:15 - Crosby details the three interconnected parts of his firm's service: commodity risk assessment, infrastructure services, and the Legend Analytics platform for understanding energy usage and efficiency.
• 2:39 - Crosby explains how the Legend Analytics platform works in the case of data center customers, by providing capabilities such as real-time metering at various levels of a facility, as well as automated carbon reporting.
• 4:46 - The discussion unpacks how the platform is offered as a SaaS, and includes consulting services tailored to each customer's needs.
• 7:49 - Notes on how the Legend Analytics platform can gather data from disparate systems and consolidate it into one dashboard, allowing for AI analysis and identification of previously unknown issues.
• 10:25 - Crosby reviews the importance of accurate and real-time emissions tracking for ESG reporting, and provides examples of how the Legend Analytics platform has helped identify errors and save costs for clients.
• 12:23 - Crosby explains how the company's new, proprietary NIC device, dubbed the Ledge, can securely gather data from any system and bring it to their cloud in real time, lowering costs and improving efficiency.
• 23:54 - Crosby touches on issues including challenges with power availability; trends in building fiber to power; utilizing power capacity from industrial plants; and on-site generation for enabling stable voltage.

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