IES-VE, EnergyPlus, CBECC, the standard energy modeling platforms used across the data center industry, were built around a single assumption: that cooling means moving air. When Sabhya Katia, a Senior Building Analyst at Stantec, led the energy and compliance work on a chip-level liquid-cooled mission-critical deployment, he discovered that the assumption was baked into the software at a structural level. There was no established path for modeling liquid cooling for energy code compliance. No industry template. No vendor guidance. Katia built the methodology himself, and it is now the internal standard across Stantec's Midwest and Atlantic teams.
