September 20, 2007

Green Grid Works With DOE, Reaches Out To Europe

The Green Grid and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy are collaborating to improve energy efficiency by educating IT managers on both the technical implementation of a greener data center and the associated financial benefits. As part of a Memorandum of Understanding, the two organizations will develop a set of best practices.
“The memorandum of understanding with the Department of Energy signals an important step for The Green Grid,” said Roger Tipley, director of The Green Grid. “This collaboration will provide IT managers with a jointly-developed set of guidelines to help improve their energy efficiency in their data center.”

Gartner recently criticized The Green Grid, saying it misses a greater opportunity to influence legislation and behavior for broader green issues. This move with the DOE might change that.

The Green Grid, which recently outlined its 2007 deliverables and technology roadmap, also announced two new working groups that will extend the organization’s presence in Europe. The new groups include a data collection and analysis working group and a communications group.The Data Collection and Analysis Working Group is chartered to collect data from European members to extend and support The Green Grid’s goals of providing industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data center energy efficiencies.
One of the initial goals of the Grid is to determine how to measure the energy efficiency of IT hardware, CBR reports. The EPA also happens to working towards a very similar goal with the expansion of its Energy Star rating system to cover servers.The EPA has already requested comments on its proposal for an Energy Star for servers.

The EPA has proposed a two tier system, according to CBR. The first tier would award an Energy Star endorsement servers that had been designed built to certain broad standards or principal, or included certain features. The second tier would involve some measure of real efficiency, in terms of energy consumed for given workload. But the EPA has yet to define exactly how this would be calculated, Tipley said.

Europe already has organizations working on IT and data efficiency, including the UK’s Green Technology Initiative, which launched in May.

A recent EPA report found that data centers in the U.S. have the potential to save up to $4 billion in annual electricity costs through more energy efficient equipment and operations, and the broad implementation of best management practices.

The Green Grid has grown to 92 members since its launch in February 2007.

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