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U.S. feds approve money for green datacenters
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 07 January 2010, 18:04 IST
Bangalore: The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has approved up to $47 million to help make datacenters and telecommunications facilities more energy efficient, reports The Resgister.
Rather than doing research directly, Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration, says that the DoE is kicking in funds pulled from last year's $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to push along efforts underway in the private sector to help make datacenters more efficient and get them to market faster.
Focusing on IT is important because of the growing energy demands that datacenters are making on the power grid. Chu said that datacenters and telecom facilities consume around 120 billion kilowatt-hours of juice, and that in the U.S., the growth in datacenter processing, storage, and networking capacity would require the building of two new power plants every year for the foreseeable future unless something changes.
"I have said many times before that we need a new industrial revolution," Chu explained. "We look at energy efficiency as some of the lowest-hanging fruit that we can pluck." Chu added that if the technologies being developed under the funded projects were used in production, they would result in some 400 billion BTUs per year of energy being saved - enough to power around two million homes in U.S.
The $47 million that has been committed to 14 projects is backed up by another $70 million in private funding coming from the firms engaging in the research. IBM and HP, received big portions of the funding, but SeaMicro, Yahoo, Columbia University, Alcatel-Lucent, Edison Materials, and Power Assure got money too.
