HP, IBM and Yahoo were among the recipients of grants from the Department of Energy for projects aimed at making data centers more energy efficient through innovative components, better power supplies and improved cooling tchnologies. The $47 million in federal stimulus money will be matched by $70 million in private industry donations.
The Department of Energy is handing out $47 million in grants to
projects aimed at increasing energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse
gas emissions from data centers and other IT facilities.
The grants, announced Jan. 6, will be distributed among 14 private
projects around the country, and will be matched by $70 million in
private industry donations, according to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
"If you look at how energy is used in IT ... at the component level,
at the rack level, [it's important] to make them more energy
efficient," Chu said during a conference call with reporters. "It's
essentially in all sectors of the IT industry. There are great gains to
be had."
The $47 million are part of the federal ARRA (American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act), and speak to the Obama administration's desire to
grow the use of more energy efficient technology and to grow jobs in
more environmentally friendly industries.
Chu said the work being done in these 14 projects, as well as in
other sectors of the IT industry, will not only lead to data centers
consuming less energy and spending less money, but also could help fuel
job growth.
More information on the projects can be found
here.
Currently, data centers account for 3 percent of all the energy
consumed in the United States-or about 120 billion kilowatt hours of
electricity annually-and at the current rate of data center growth and
energy consumption, could surpass the airline industry as the fourth
largest generator of greenhouse gases in the country, said Brad Wurtz,
president and CEO of Power Assure, a power management solutions
provider for data centers and a recipient of $5 million in DOE grant
money.
"Our goal is to double the energy efficiency in data centers within five years," Wurtz said during the press conference.
In addition, Chu said, the projected growth in the number of new
data centers in the United States will require two new large power
plants per year just to keep pace with anticipated power demand.
The ARRA money is going to projects that address at least on of
three areas, including making the core data center and
telecommunications components-such as servers and networking
devices-more energy efficient and developing software that will
optimize energy use by the devices.
In addition, the projects also are looking at the power supply chain
to help reduce power loss and heat dissipation as electricity moves
through the IT components, and at ways to improve the methods and
technologies used to cool the systems.
Power Assure sells power monitoring and management software for data
centers. Hewlett-Packard received $7.4 billion, the third most
allocated to a company. Doug Oathout, vice president of converged
infrastructure at HP, also was at the press conference and said HP's
work touches on not only power supplies but also cooling technologies.
Oathout said that HP's technologies can help businesses reduce power
consumption in their data centers by as much as 40 percent, which not
only helps cut costs, but also extends the life of a data center and
decreases the need for new facilities.
Yahoo received the most grant money, at $9.9 million, followed by
SeaMicro, a company currently in stealth mode that is focused on data
center power, which received $9.3 million.
Columbia University and Edison Materials Technology Center each
received $2.8 million, and IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center received
two grants totaling $3.3 million. Alcatel-Lucent received $1.8 million,
and Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs got $300,000.
Others receving money were California Institute of Technology, Lineage Power, BAE Systems and Federspiel Controls.
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