Born, raised, and educated in Germany, Carsten Baumann, Solution Architect and Director of Strategic Initiatives at Schneider Electric, calls the United States his home these days. Baumann’s travels took many different routes, from a town outside of Frankfurt to the glitz of Los Angeles and now a quiet, more rural ZIP code in Colorado. But one constant remained: engineering. Baumann spoke with Raymond Hawkins about his journey and career in systems engineering.

Schneider Electric does some exciting work with Compass Datacenters utilizing microgrids, something Baumann knows inside and out. As recent as five years ago, Baumann said many people in the data center world had no idea what microgrids were. A lot’s changed since then. “The definition of a microgrid has evolved, but as we understand it now, it’s something where we have a combination of distributed energy resources, like local energy generation assets we can use in case a grid goes down,” Baumann said.

Baumann said microgrids solve three critical issues in the data center world. “One is greater resiliency, which we all want in a data center. Number two, which is a huge factor as well and becoming more and more prevalent and important, is sustainability,” Baumann said. “And the third one is overall, of course, cost and cost benefits. Ideally, we want to have everything. We want to be more sustainable; we have greater resiliency, and it ought to be cheaper.”

Today, the education around microgrids is growing, and Baumann said potential data center customers want specifics around how microgrids can help them and the best approach they should take. “I believe site selection for data centers will expand the criteria to meet sustainability aspects,” he said. “Being able to do onsite power generation when the electricity is expensive, we may be able to produce it cheaper ourselves and more sustainable, so the carbon intensity of our own electricity is less than the carbon intensity of the electricity we buy from the utility company.”