I’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing information on utility data center energy efficiency programs for a presentation I’m putting together for AFCOM Data Center World, and have been struck by how few prescriptive programs (or “deemed measures”) are available for data center equipment. The few programs that do exist seem to vary widely and are distributed among different utilities around the country.
The most important information you need for creating these programs are data on which to base your assumptions and calculations, including, data on the typical products in the market (or the baseline) and data on the more efficient offerings. The delta between these two establishes the energy savings on which to base an incentive. This was similar in my previous work developing specifications for the ENERGY STAR program for the EPA – the biggest problem was access to quality data of sufficient quantity to really understand the energy use of the products. This is a great strength of the ENERGY STAR program, because as a trusted third party they are able to pull in data from a number of different current, and sometimes future, products to get a real sense of how energy is used across different manufacturers. When they are pulled together these EPA data sets often seem to be some of the best publically available data sets on the energy consumption of these products – a resource that is useful for the program, as well as for other advocates outside the program.
It seems that the utility industry lacks a similar mechanism to collect sufficient data to develop these prescriptive incentive programs for data center equipment. The primary source of data seems to be data collected through demonstrations and custom incentive applications. But the utility industry needs a large amount of data to maintain confidence that the prescriptive programs will deliver actual energy savings that they can reliably claim for their programs. However, the utility industry, like ENERGY STAR itself, has only recently taken the plunge into the data center industry. A lot of programs have a random assortment of incentives they’ve given out for data centers – an efficient UPS here, an economizer there, a few virtual servers in the mix – and do not seem to be reaching the critical mass needed to gather the quantity of information needed to effectively develop prescriptive programs.
I think this turns into a chicken and egg problem. Utilities sometimes find it hard to get traction on their data center programs because they do not have the prescriptive programs that make it easy for the customer to participate, but without the data from participation in the programs they do not have the information needed to develop the prescriptive programs. As usual, available data seems to be a bottleneck. What is needed are some central depositories of data with mechanisms to develop intelligent incentives based on that data. A lot of different groups and organizations have the potential to work toward this goal (and I believe are doing so), and it is an important goal as more prescriptive incentives would certainly help capture some of the energy savings potential which we all know exists in this industry. I’d be really interested to hear about any potential efforts in this area, so if anyone knows about anything fill me in!
Tags: data, Data Center, Energy Efficiency, Energy Market Innovations, energy star, Incentive Programs, prescriptive programs, Utilities
