US Federal Government and Data Centers

Business News

Thursday, 29 January 2009 15:03

Written by Bob DeCoufle

This was the first step that appears to be the increasing involvement and interest in energy efficiency for data centers by the US Federal Government.

A new administration is now in office and it is clear that President Obama is interested in developing energy efficient policies that will touch IT and the data center environment at government facilities and possibly beyond.

Prior to President Obama’s inauguration he and his staff arranged a meeting with IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano to discuss what impact investing in IT could have on job creation. The response to then President-Elect Obama received was to help deliver broadband to give high-speed Internet access to locations that now don't have it. The second recommendation was to improve healthcare documentation so that it is digitized and stored for easier transfers and compliance. The final recommendation was to improve our grid with smarter technologies that can incorporate “green” solutions like wind, geothermal and solar. 

Fast forward to today and you find that the Obama administration is tackling these issues head on from the current HR 598 (The Electronic Health Care Privacy) bill that will digitize medical records and help improve the federal government record keeping system to discussions on broadband delivery and improvements of our electrical grid system.

When President Obama met with Mr. Palmisano they also discussed the recommendation that all federal data centers go green in three years.

Prior to meeting with Mr. Palmisano, then Senator Obama had been stumping across the United States on his promises to pay closer attention to energy and environmental issues including an Energy Efficiency Grant program that would award those states and localities that take the first steps to implement new building codes that prioritize energy efficiency.

It was clear during his campaign that part of his changing of America would include making it less dependent on foreign fuel and more energy efficient. To achieve this goal he surrounded himself with many of the brightest in this field including the Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL), Stephen Chu who is now the US’s Secretary of Energy.

Secretary Stephen Chu may not be a household name, but for those who are engaged in physics, data center and energy efficiency his name is well known. Mr. Chu is a Nobel Prize winner for his research in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light. As the previous Director for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories he was engaged in the report offered to Congress on Data Center and Server energy efficiency.

LBNL and the EPA continues its research on data center and energy efficiency and have provided startling figures regarding data center energy consumption.

The federal government spends more than $479 million a year to power its data centers, which house more than 599,000 computer servers, HP and Intel estimate. The companies’ cost-savings projections assume each server uses 2,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per year at a cost of 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. Running the servers accounts for one-quarter of the cost, while cooling the systems accounts for half of the cost.

Unless agencies improve the efficiency of their data centers beyond current trends, EPA said the government’s electricity cost for servers and data centers could reach $740 million a year by 2011.

In a time when the US Federal Government is looking for ways to save and help generate new work the movement to energy efficient data centers is a no brainer.

Federal research and education on higher efficient data centers has been led by the EPA and has been joined by the Department of Energy to create a joint national data center energy efficiency information program. The program coordinates a wide variety of activities from the DOE Industrial Technologies Program Save Energy Now initiative, the DOE Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), and the EPA ENERGY STAR program.

The EPA and DOE have co-sponsored a program entitled Laboratories for the 21st Century (Labs21). Labs21 is designed to meet the needs of laboratory and high performance facility designers, engineers, owners, and facility managers.

According to the Labs21 website, “The primary guiding principle of the Labs21 approach is that improving the energy efficiency and environmental performance of these facilities (labs and data centers) requires examining the entire facility from a "whole building" perspective. Adopting this perspective allows owners to improve the efficiency of the entire facility, rather than focusing on specific building components. As Labs21 participants understand, improving the efficiency of individual components without examining their relation to the entire system can eliminate opportunities to make other more significant efficiency improvements.”

In a recent interview (Click here to view Video) with Richard Kidd, Program Director of the Department of Energy's Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) he gives concrete examples of the U.S. government's commitment to improving energy efficiency through cooperation and leadership including the work that is being performed by Labs21 on data center energy efficiency.

According to the EPA, if half of the nation's private and public research laboratories including data centers achieve energy efficiency improvements of 30 percent, then the United States could reduce annual electricity consumption by 84 trillion BTUs. This figure equals the electricity consumed by 2.2 million U.S. households. This improvement would save $1.2 billion in utility costs, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 16.7 million tons, and remove the equivalent of 3 million automobiles from US highways each year.

These are the figures that the new President is starring at. President Obama is also receiving an earful from his friends in the IT sector along with his Secretary of Energy. It is likely that it will not be long before an executive order is made that will mandate that all Federal data center facilities be “green” in a fixed time period. The issue at this point is the development of a clear program to achieve the goal. Rest assured that the program has been and is rapidly being worked on.

The success of this program could have ramifications across the data center industry. If the program is successful at the Federal level we may begin to hear about a new Federal tax on private companies who are not meeting the energy efficiency for their data centers. Stay tuned.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed