IT and communications giants including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo! are to receive a $47 million boost from the US Department of Energy (DOE) to improve energy efficiency.
IT and telecommunications centres currently use around 120 billion kWh per year, equating to 3% of US total electricity use. The rapid growth of the sector could require two new large power plants a year to keep up with energy demand, unless improvements in energy efficiency are made.
“By reducing energy use and energy costs for the IT and telecommunications industries, this funding will help create jobs and ensure the sector remains competitive,” commented Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “The expected growth of these industries means that new technologies adopted today will yield benefits for many years to come.”
The DOE investment with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), together with $70 million from private industry sources, will support 14 research and development projects.
The projects will be focussed in three areas: optimising energy use with software, servers and networking devices; developing technologies to minimise power loss and heat generation in the power supply chain; and demonstrating more effective and lower power cooling technologies.
IBM’s research centre in California will receive $1.6 million to develop facility management tools to reduce power consumption from cooling systems, while California company SeaMicro has been awarded the largest grant of $9.3 million to pursue a strategy of using hundreds of low-power processors, which could reduce computing energy use by 75%.
Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, will be using a $7.4 million grant to develop modular data centres for small-to-medium businesses with integrated an cooling and power supply system that is easy to connect up to renewable energy sources.
The largest single award of $9.9 million goes to Yahoo! for a project that will design and engineer a next-generation passive cooling date centre for a major internet company. The project will include building design and the location of servers within the building to optimise the use of outside ambient air for cooling.