Environmental Leader

To promote energy efficiency projects, the Department of Energy has showered $47 million in grants on IT and communication firms.

IBM, Yahoo, Alcatel-Lucent and HP are among firms receiving the grants, which will be matched by $70 million in private industry funding, reports PCWorld.

IBM is getting $1.66 million to develop and field test software-based management tools to reduce data center cooling energy. IBM also is getting $2.35 million to develop data center cooling using a liquid metal thermal interface.

SeaMicro will get $9.3 million to re-engineer server components in such a way that reduces energy. The goal is to build servers that consist of hundreds of interconnected low-power processors, which may save 75 percent of the energy associated with current servers.

Lineage Power Corp. is getting $2.4 million to develop a more efficient power rectifier. Rectifiers consume about 25 percent of the energy used in data centers.

HP is getting $7.4 million to build a modular data center with integrated alternating current cooling and distributed energy systems.

Power Assure is getting $5 million to demonstrate software and hardware to help power down servers that are not needed.

Yahoo is getting $9.9 million to develop a passive cooling design for data centers.

Alcatel-Lucent will use its $1.8 million to develop a refrigerant-based cooling technology for information and communications infrastructure.

To see a full list of projects, click here (PDF).

Data center energy efficiency is considered one of the prime ways to move the bar on energy conservation.

One recent example of a new data center in Atlanta projects a 27 percent reduction in energy consumption, when compared to similar facilities. The new data center, owned by Corus360, is expected to attain LEED Gold status.

In another example, Cisco Systems, the networking equipment giant, achieved an estimated savings of $120,000 per year in energy costs by simulating a data center using Future Facilities’ Virtual Facility (VF) simulation methodology, which ties together cooling, availability and efficiency in one analytic model.