The Energy Department's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office discovered that data centers make up 1.2 percent of country's total electricity use in 2005.

Together with the Energy Department, the EPA launched in mid-March an initiative called the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Program that set to gather data center energy information.

Kathleen Vokes, a member of the Energy Star product development team at EPA, said Tuesday that to define those measurements, the program needs to collect energy use information from data centers.

So far, only 54 facilities have offered to provide this information to the program including 365 Main, which falls short of the pool of 100 facilities that Vokes hopes to gather information from. Despite this, Vokes says that monitoring for the project will begin June 1, regardless on the number of facilities participating.

Speaking on a panel at yesterday's Green Computing Summit, Vokes says the program must also gather more information on the performance of the facilities before technology further develops. With the technology of data centers advancing at such a rapid pace, Vokes says "there just isn?t enough information right now."

The EPA wants to compare the energy use of data centers with the total use of the buildings that house them, says Vokes. This ratio would establish the grounds of comparison before comparing the data with the function and reliability of the centers and the climate of their locations.

Vokes says the program will collect the first set of data on July 1, then subsequently follow up with quarterly reports until the project closes on June 1, 2009.

Another organization that is working towards advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems is the Green Grid (thegreengrid.org), comprised of data centers like STRATO.

The Green Grid signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the EPA in April to accelerate the adoption of best practices for energy efficiency in existing computer/server rooms throughout the agency.