(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — California utility provider PG&E (www.pge.com) will start offering financial incentives for California data centers that purchase servers accredited with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star rating, the utility company announced Thursday at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit in Sunnyvale, California.
Mark Bramfitt, the principal program manager for customer energy efficiency at PG&E, discussed the incentives program in his presentation at the summit. He later revealed that he will soon be leaving PG&E after 25 years with the utility.
After more than two years in development, the EPA introduced in May the Energy Star for Enterprise Servers certification which strives to improve data center energy efficiency by setting up qualifications for servers as being considered energy-efficient.
The certification measures the categories of managing power supply performance, functioning in a virtualized environment, and energy benchmarks for measuring and reporting server energy use.
The Energy Star initiative is designed to make it easier for data center operators to compare the energy efficiency of servers from major vendors.
When PG&E customers select Energy Star servers, the vendors that manufacture those servers will receive financial incentives, who will then pass on the savings to the end user customer.
So far there are only 10 servers that have received the Energy Star certification, including four Proliant servers from HP, three Lenovo ThinkServers, and three Primergy servers from Fujitsu.
In 2008, PG&E handed out $7 million in energy reduction incentives which 7MW of load reduction. The company has also set aside $50 million for program spending from 2010 to 2012.
PG&E has already given a few data center operators large rebates including $1.4 million to NetApp, $900,000 to Fortune Data Centers, $168,000 to 365 Main and $129,000 to Sonic.net.
