LL Bean, Emerson Data Centers Use Natural Light to Reduce Power Use

August 5, 2009

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Companies are employing natural light in their new data centers to help reduce power use. This approach used in data centers at L.L. Bean and Emerson Electric, as examples, is encouraged in part by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard, reports Computer World.

Both the L.L. Bean and Emerson Electric data centers were built using LEED specifications. The L.L. Bean data center recently was LEED silver certified, and Emerson expect to be certified. The Emerson data center also includes a solar panel array on the roof, which is capable of generating 100 kilowatts of power to supplement building power usage, according to Computer World.

Although LEED certification is widely followed in office building construction, it has not made much traction with data centers; only eight data centers are certified in the United States, and 17 others are in line for certification, according to the article.

L.L. Bean’s 2-story data center was designed to minimize the impact on the land, while Emerson’s design for its 35,000 square-foot data center was targeted at energy efficiency and as part of a project to consolidate IT operations across 135 data centers. Emerson says the data center is 31 percent more energy efficient than traditional data centers.

Emerson Electric also recently announced an alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc. to provide businesses with technologies that improve energy efficiency in data centers, reports Boston.com.

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Reader Comments

Admirable effort but, when put into context, more of a risk than an advantage. High density data-room lighting in a medium density load data-room represents less than 0.7% of the power consumption. Most data-rooms here in Europe have the lights on motion detectors and they are, therefore 0W for >20 hours/day. The alternative of using daylight increases the security risk form windows and, very probably, means using light-tubes penetrating the ceiling – which is a point of potential water leakage. When its dark you still have to have lights so just turning the lights off seems to be the best strategy?

Ian Bitterlin | August 5th, 2009

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