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The Greening of IT
148 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

The Environmentally Friendly Aspect of
Green Data Centers

In addition to energy efficiency, case studies for electric utilities bring up
the aspect of emissions, global warming, and carbon footprint for data cen-
ters. This fits with the overall idea behind green IT—for example, energy
efficiency that is also eco-friendly. Typically, corporations don’t generate the
electricity for their IT systems. Thus, the environmental impact of the gener-
ation of electricity for their IT systems is out of their control. Electric utili-
ties are often an exception. However, in the author’s experience, many electric
utility office buildings and often data centers are not in a region where the
utility supplies electricity. In addition to electric utilities, some companies
are starting to generate electricity for their data centers using new technol-
ogy such as fuel cells. Also, the backup systems for data centers (for example,
diesel generators) are usually owned and run by each company. An
Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) based on battery systems provides
power backup to outages of up to 15 minutes or 20 minutes. The diesel
backup systems are used for longer power outages. Environmentally, the ptg
diesel backup systems are a concern, but if they are rarely or never needed,
that aspect would and should not be a significant aspect of evaluating green
IT for a company.
As discussed previously, electric utilities are also very interesting case
studies because the utilities can provide rate cases to give their customers
incentives to move to green IT.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E)

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) has been active in promoting green
IT. PG&E has worked with several IT vendors to consolidate its servers, and
the company has developed new ways to measure and reduce heat in data cen-
ters. They announced this initiative at a conference in New York City, where
companies, such as American Power Conversion Corp., Eaton Corp., General
Electric Consumer & Industrial, and others gathered to discuss green com-
puting and power-saving initiatives in 2007.
PG&E also worked with the Lawrence Berkeley Lab to produce a useful
white paper giving design guidelines for high-performance (green) data cen-
ters. This PG&E document on “High-Performance Data Centers” is listed in
the Bibliography, and the URL is also given here for convenience: