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Energy Companies Urge Greener Tech
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One challenge is that utility companies are not IT experts, so one goal of the meeting was to educate them about energy usage in data centers. "One of the companies in our region is Microsoft, and they probably know 50 times more about the technology than we do," Whiting said.
PG&E also had some teething problems. Some customers complained at first that it was too hard to calculate how much energy they would save, and therefore how much of a rebate they would be entitled to, so PG&E greatly simplified the formula, Cole said.
Interest among customers is high, according to Rogers. "I've visited 50 data center customers, and there's tremendous support for this program," he said.
Paul McGuckin, a Gartner research vice president who spoke at the event, said companies are interested in the programs for financial reasons and because they are "really frightened" about running out of data center capacity. Concerns about the environment are rarely mentioned, except for public relations purposes, he said.
A report last year from the Environmental Protection Agency said data centers account for 1.5 percent of the total energy consumed in the U.S. "This may not sound like a lot, but the escalation is truly frightening," McGuckin said.
Most data centers are run very inefficiently, he said. Some easy ways to conserve energy are to consolidate industry-standard servers, turn servers off when they are not in use, raise the temperature of data centers and, when possible, use natural air for cooling.
Joe Skorupa, another Gartner vice president, said networking equipment is often ignored but accounts for perhaps 10 percent of data center power consumption. Customers should explore high-density switches offered by several vendors, he said.
He advised against Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, which he said consumes more power than lower-capacity Ethernet and is not required by most users. And he urged people to think twice about fancy VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones. "Eight-line color display VoIP phones suck up more power, and all anybody looks at is the last two numbers dialled," he said.
