After the departure of Andrew Fanara from EPA, a new person is in charge of Energy Star for data centers. She is Una Song.

She gave a talk on EPA’s efforts on Energy Star at the recent DatacenterDynamics in San Francisco.

Una Song

It was a good summary of Energy Star for data centers. Here’s a set of videos from her presentation. There was a little surprise during her talk. One of the participants started questioning why power generated with renewable energies is not counted in the computation of PUE. His claim is that power generated by clean energy should be given some credit. In an extreme argument, he says PUE could be 50, yet all the power fueling the data center might be from renewables. The absence of GHG emissions in that case should be commended rather than the bad PUE frowned upon. That interaction is captured toward the end of videos 2 and 3. This reminds me of the metric (called Data Center Performance per Energy, or DPPE) proposed by Japan’s Green IT Promotion Council.

	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		Energy Efficient Cooling for Data Centers: A Close-Coupled Row Solution
	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This metric takes the use of renewables into account. To refresh your memory, here is the definition of DPPE:

DPPE =

(IT equipment utilization * IT equipment ability)

/ (total power consumed – green power used)

DPPE was also mentioned in another session. That will come later.

1. Video of Una Song’s presentation on Energy Star for data centers-Video1
2. Video of Una Song’s presentation on Energy Star for data centers-Video2
3. Video of Una Song’s presentation on Energy Star for data centers-Video3
4. Video of Una Song’s presentation on Energy Star for data centers-Video4

Tags: Energy Efficiency