Environmental Leader

GE Digital Energy, a business of GE Enterprise Solutions, has released the latest addition to its ecomagination product portfolio, the 750 kVA SG Series Digital Energy uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system for data centers.

Certified under GE’s ecomagination Product Review (EPR) process, committed to delivering innovative technologies that meet environmental challenges, the 750 kVA UPS system achieves efficiency of more than 94 percent at a typical 50 percent load.

GE’s energy-efficient UPS technology helps data centers achieve a high level of energy efficiency without sacrificing high-power capacity or reliability, said Larry Sollecito, president and CEO for the Lombard, Ill.-based company.

Many businesses don’t realize the cost savings possible by improving a data center’s energy efficiency. Servers and data centers in the U.S. consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or twice as much as in 2000, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Helping customers to reduce energy consumption and costs, ten GE 750 kVA UPS systems operating in a typical data center at 50 percent load use approximately 60 kW to 100 kW less power and require on average 30 kW to 50 kW less power for cooling than competitors’ systems, according to GE. This lowers the total power required to operate and cool a data center by 90 kW to 150 kW on average. In terms of operating and cooling electric energy costs, this translates into a $76,000 to $130,000 per year savings, assuming an electric energy price of $0.10/kWh, said GE.

In addition, by using ten GE 750kVA UPS systems in a typical data center at 50 percent load, a company can avoid the annual emission of 460 to 780 metric tons of CO2 on the U.S. grid, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of 90 to 150 cars on U.S. roads.

GE recently completed its own energy-efficiency renovation of its Cincinnati data center, including a cooling system retrofit that will reduce its water use by one-fifth and save 24 million kilowatt-hours of power each year.