To help clients benchmark and improve the efficiency of their IT operations and reduce their environmental impact, IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced the first corporate-led initiative to enable clients to earn energy efficiency certificates for reducing the energy needed to run their data centers.
The certificates earned — based on energy use reduction verified by a third-party — provide a way for businesses to attain a certified measurement of their energy use reduction, a key, emerging business metric.
The certificates can be traded for cash on the growing energy efficiency certificate market or otherwise retained to demonstrate reductions in energy use and associated CO2 emissions.
Neuwing Energy Ventures, a leading verifier of energy efficiency projects and marketer of energy efficiency certificates, will document and verify the energy savings a client achieves.
Said Rich Lechner, IBM’s Vice President of IT Optimization, “A key ingredient for clients to effectively become more environmentally aware and efficient is measuring where they are. Using this process, clients can gain an understanding of the business and environmental value in reducing data center energy consumption.”
Data centers can consume as much as 15 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building and, in some cases, may be 100% more energy intensive. Energy efficiency opportunities can be significant.
The System z consolidation project announced as part of IBM’s Project Big Green earlier this year (consolidating 3900 distributed servers onto 33 System z servers in IBM data centers around the world), is anticipated to help conserve up to 119,000 MWH annually(3), enough electricity to power approximately 9,000 average homes in the U.S.
IBM intends to make the Efficiency Certificates program available across its entire line of systems and storage offerings, beginning with System z and System p in 2007. The Efficiency Certificates will first be available in the United States, and IBM hopes to expand participation to Europe in 2008.
About IBM Project Big Green
Announced in May 2007, Project Big Green is a $1 billion investment to increase the efficiency of IBM products. New IBM products and services, announced as part of Project Big Green, include a five step approach to energy efficiency in the data center that, if followed, could sharply reduce data center energy consumption and provide energy savings of up to 42% for an average data center. The initiative includes a new global “green team” of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM.
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