SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

The government should look into channeling the heat from data centers and server rooms into heating for government buildings and providing hot water.

Initiatives to do this are already underway overseas in in Finland and Switzerland.

Systems like this would pay for themselves and are better for the environment.

It might also be good policy to consider locating data centers in colder climate locations to maximize the... more »

Promote the use of alternative financing contract vehicles, such as Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC) and Utility Energy Service Contracts (UESC) for data center consolidation projects. Limiited budgets only allow for small interim improvements in greening the federal IT infrastructure. ESPC & UESC would provide the capital investment needed to make a substantial transformation in federal IT infrastructure,... more »

This is a simple, cost effective, and efficient way to help reduce the environmental profile (cooling) of our data centers. For a minimal cost we could potentially save a lot of money trying to cool our IT data centers. Using only a plastic (or similar material) that would add an extra layer of abstraction between the hot and cold aisles in our data centers. They are easy to maintain and are made so as to not hinder... more »

Recommend an EO be issued to ban the construction of data centers over 500 sqft from federal office buildings. Computer servers should be housed in specially designed energy efficient data centers. Currently, most of the federal data centers are located in the basement of standard office buildings. They are not metered, nor properly (energy) managed. Since IT doesn't pay the electric bill, there is no incentive to... more »

Require every federal data center be assigned a certified Data Center Energy Practitioner (DCEP). DOE has identified this as a data center best practice in its 2011 Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan (SSPP). Currently, very few federal data centers have active energy efficiency policies and practices in place. Assigning a DCEP to each data center would greatly assist the Facilities & IT orgs in the identification... more »