Energy Saving News
DOE Grant IT + .Com $47 Million For Energy Efficiency
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is granting IT and communications giants a $47 million boost to improve energy efficiency.
These major groups include IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo!.
IT and telecommunications centers currently consume approximately 120 billion kWh/year, which is 3% of America's total electricity use.
Energy efficiency improvements are needed in order to suppress the need for 2 large power plants per year to keep up with energy demand, due to the rapid growth of the sector.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu gives his insight: “By reducing energy use and energy costs for the IT and telecommunications industries, this funding will help create jobs and ensure the sector remains competitive. The expected growth of these industries means that new technologies adopted today will yield benefits for many years to come.”
Council Member of the Energy Saving Association (ESA), Mr. Mark Sinden, supports the DOE's energy efficiency plan: "Energy efficiency provides certitude for the future. Companies that adopt energy saving solutions can be sure that they will continually be saving energy and money, throughout time. As for the initial investment, it is returned within a few months in the form of reduced energy bills. This investment is not even necessary for companies benefiting from funding aids such as the DOE's".
The DOE investment, with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and with a $70 million input from private industry sources, will support 14 research and development projects.
The projects will focus on 3 elements: optimising energy use with software, servers and networking devices; developing technologies to minimise power loss and heat generation in the power supply chain; and demonstrating more effective and lower power cooling technologies.
IBM’s research center in California will receive a $1.6 million share of the grant, to develop facility management tools to reduce power consumption from cooling systems.
A large share of the grant was awarded to the California-based company SeaMicro, with $9.3 million, to pursue a strategy of using hundreds of low-power processors, which could reduce computing energy use by 75%.
Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard will be given a $7.4 million grant to develop modular data centers for small-to-medium businesses with an integrated cooling and power supply system that is easy to connect up to renewable energy sources.
Yahoo! recieve $9.9 million, for a project that will design and engineer a next-generation passive cooling date center for a major internet company. The project will include building design and the location of servers within the building to optimise the use of outside ambient air for cooling.
Friday 8th January 2010
