Energy Efficiency Programs and Evaluation in Europe (And more importantly, an excuse to talk about the World Cup)

I am finally returning after a long hiatus from blogging, and from two weeks in Europe after speaking at the International Energy Program Evaluation Conference (IEPEC).  My talk was on EMI’s work evaluating data center efficiency programs for US utilities. EMI was also a silver sponsor for the event, which was IEPEC’s first conference outside the U.S.. The conference included numerous interesting sessions on methods and challenges in evaluating energy efficiency programs in the U.S., Europe, Australia and China, making it a truly international conference.

The U.S. vs. the Rest of the World

There was an interesting undercurrent at the conference stemming from differences in the way energy efficiency programs are run internationally. In the U.S. evaluation programs tend to focus on utility run programs, which are typically accountable to the goals put on them from state utility commissions. At the federal level, energy efficiency programs in the U.S. do not have the same level of accountability – there are efforts to accurately determine savings but there is not the same focus on independent evaluation to confirm savings.

In the rest of the world, especially in Europe, it seems that programs and evaluation are mostly on the national government level and do not have the same level of accountability that U.S. utilities are subject to by regulators. One of the most interesting sessions at IEPEC was a panel discussion with Paolo Bertoldi of the European Commission and Dian Grueneich, the Lead Commissioner for Energy Efficiency of the California Public Utilities Commission.  The debate revolved around the need for energy savings goals and accountability through evaluation.  Paolo of the EC contended that program goals were unnecessary, that you can create programs that can help people save energy, and then drive them to save energy through other efforts like carbon taxation.  With this approach, and with no goals to meet, there is less need for independent evaluation to determine the impacts of a program.  Commissioner Grueneich, on the other hand, was arguing more for goals and accountability for the money spent on energy efficiency.

I can see Paolo’s argument, but the scientist and engineer in me wants to see real results.  You set up a program on the theory that it’s going to provide energy savings, but until you study it closely you do not know what the savings are actually achieved.  Furthermore, if you do not have good metrics to measure the impacts of the program, how do you know when a program needs improvement or how much it has improved when you make changes?  In practice, there is often a large gap between program theory, implementation and results; evaluators help define and reduce these differences for program designers.  Furthermore, solid process evaluation helps programs find ways to improve its processes, which in turn improve the program impacts.

I have a feeling this debate will continue, but IEPEC deserves credit for bringing this conversation to a truly international stage.  There seemed to be a lot of interest from European participants on learning more about the established evaluation techniques used for U.S. utilities and the development of international evaluation standards, and the success of energy efficiency programs can not but help to improve by the sharing of this information.

So, What Does This Have to Do with the World Cup?

The week after the conference I spent traveling in North East France with a short jump into Germany.  As an avid soccer fan, I spent much of this time sitting in cafes and restaurants watching the World Cup.  During the France v. Uruguay game the streets of Strasbourg were virtually barren and most everything was closed on a Friday night at 7:30 pm.  It seemed as if the French were busy watching quietly at home.  Across the border, in Freiburg Germany, every restaurant had what looked like a brand new TV outside the door so you could sit outside and watch the game, or casual passer-byers could watch the game (sales of flat screens must be through the roof in Germany).  They also had huge screens in some of the public parks for viewing.  After Germany beat Australia 4-0 in their first game, the bars and streets were absolutely mobbed with celebration.  Back in the U.S., things are less intense, but interest in the Cup, and the U.S. National Team seems to be at an all-time high after the U.S.’s great run through the group stage and emotional win on Wednesday.

So What’s the Point?

Theses experiences transposed on each other has driven home the fact that the world is increasingly becoming an international community.  There are large differences in mentalities, traditions and practices around the world, and engagement in the international community, whether through friendly competition or collaboration, helps us understand and learn from our international peers and see things from alternate viewpoints.  I like to feel that international engagement and sharing of information helps everyone involved, so thanks to IEPEC for a great conference, and to FIFA and ESPN for such a great event.

As a side note, IT technology and data centers are two of the tools helping the world participate in these global experiences.  The New York Times reports that ESPN.com’s traffic is up 70% over its traditional annual peak during the final four – another reminder of the explosive growth of internet usage and data center power consumption.  Ok, enough on that.  Spain / Portugal kicks off in an hour – should be a scorcher! Check it out on ESPN3.com.

Key Take-Aways of Colocation Research for Silicon Valley Power

Last fall EMI, under subcontract to Summit Blue Consulting (now a part of Navigant Consulting), performed a process evaluation for Silicon Valley Power (SVP) in Santa Clara California.  The process evaluation focused on identifying barriers to colocation data centers (or “colos”) participating in SVP’s energy efficiency programs.  Colos provide data center infrastructure to support other companies’ IT equipment – basically data center space for rent.  This space can be leased in units as small as half a rack and as big as thousands of square feet.  The latter situation, where whole rooms or even whole data centers are leased to one tenant, are known as “wholesale” colocation facilities.

Santa Clara has a dense concentration of data centers and colocation facilities.  This is largely due to their location in the heart of Silicon Valley, but also is due to their relatively low cost of power and high reliability of their power delivery. As a result of this high concentration, data centers are a main focus of the SVP energy efficiency programs, and in 2007-2008, roughly 60% of SVP’s energy savings came from data center related projects.

EMI conducted this research by performing: online research and a document review of appropriate reports, and in-depth interviews with colo managers from inside and outside SVP’s service territory and other industry experts.  Here are some of the main take-aways from EMI’s research into participation of colocation facilities in SVP’s programs.

• Aggravated Barriers – Since providing reliable data center space is a colo’s main business, some of the barriers to energy efficiency for typical data centers are aggravated in the colocation facilities’ case.  These include an extreme focus on reliability, with little interest in energy efficiency.  It also creates an extreme case of the split incentive, because the people paying the power bill and the IT purchasers work for completely different companies, so there is little motivation to invest in more efficient equipment.
• Pricing Models of Colos Affect Investment in Efficiency– Different colocation companies have different methods for splitting up charges for power, cooling and space.  While data centers become more constrained by power and cooling (and less constrained by space), some colocation facilities are moving away from space-based charges and more towards charging directly for power and cooling, which helps create more of an incentive for their customers to save energy.
• Difficulty in Reaching the Colocation Facilities’ Customers –SVP, like other utilities, is restricted to only offer incentives to their customers of record.  This is necessary as it allows SVP to be able to recoup the incentive amounts if the measure does not stay in place for the contracted five-year period, and therefore the measure does not deliver the full five years of savings SVP claims for the measure.  As a result, SVP cannot give incentives to the colocation facilities’ customers, as these customers do not pay SVP for their power, but instead the cost of power is bundled with their colo charges.  This is a major barrier for many utilities to getting colocation customers to participate in virtualization incentives, for example.
• Lack of Expertise for Completing Calculations – Some facilities indicated that they did not have the engineering expertise on staff to complete the necessary calculations to receive incentives, as operating colos are basically “a couple IT guys with a sales department.” SVP offers support to fill out the applications, but some potential participants were not aware of this, so this was an area where better communication of the program offerings could help increase participation from companies that need this support.

All in all, the evaluation found that SVP’s focus on data centers has been very successful and that they are undertaking a lot of efforts to help overcome these barriers such as: emphasizing new construction where the barriers and inertia to energy efficiency are not as great, and offering technical support where it is needed.  Other opportunities lie in collaborating with other utilities to identify new opportunities (e.g., for prescriptive measures which simplify the application process), and investigating new ways to get to colo customers.  Although there are many barriers in place for colocation facilities, this is a large data center market, it is growing rapidly, and it is worth having progressive utilities like SVP continue to push to develop programs and processes to overcome these barriers.

The full report (available here) offers more detail on the colocation market and barriers to their participation in energy efficiency programs.

How big can data centers be? How about 19 football fields?

Today I realized that my understanding of how large data centers can get was significantly understated.  This realization came as I reviewed Data Center Knowledge’s special report on the world’s largest data centers.  I have previously used #5, Microsoft’s Chicago data center, as an example of one of the largest, but was shocked to realize that the largest is almost 60% bigger.  Another interesting result is that seven of the top ten are colocation facilities.  This is significant because it is often difficult to get colocation facilities to engage in energy efficiency programs, especially after they’re operational. The other three – and the only corporate data centers in the top 10 – are all Microsoft facilities. A number of the facilities (including the largest) are also buildings converted to data centers from other uses.  Since these are not purpose-built data centers, my guess would be that they are probably not ideally designed in terms of efficiency.

I’m also disappointed to see that relatively few have energy use or even power capacity listed.  In an environment where power is starting to dominate as the primary constraint on data center growth, wouldn’t it make sense to track a list of the largest data centers in terms of energy use?

Here are some other highlights from the report:

#10. SuperNAP (407,000 SF) – Number ten is notable mostly for its power consumption.  At 250 MW capacity it boasts densities of up to 1,500 w/SF, made possible through advanced cooling using “a high-density T-SCIF (Thermal Separate Compartment in Facility) containment system to fully separate the hot and cold aisles.”

#7. i/o Data Centers Phoenix ONE (538,000 SF) – This one just seems to keep popping up, with “enormous rooftop array of solar panels that will eventually generate as much as 4.5 megawatts of power for the data center, and a thermal storage system that will allow i/o Data Centers to run chillers for its cooling systems at night when power rates are lower.”

#6. Microsoft’s Dublin Data Center (550,000 SF) – This one operates 100% of the time on outside air through the use of economizers and “Microsoft says it can run its server rooms at temperatures of up to 95 degrees F (35 degrees Celsius),” which should give it an efficiency advantage.

#5. Microsoft Chicago Data Center (700,000 SF) – A large portion of this data center consists of double-stacked 40-foot shipping containers that are each filled with up to 2,000 servers.  Containers make the system highly scalable and efficient.

#1. Digital Realty Trust Lakeside Technology Center (1.1 M SF, 100+ MW of power) – In Chicago, this data center used to house the printing presses for the Yellow Book and the Sears Catalog. It was converted to telecom use in 1999 and is now 2^nd largest power customer for Commonwealth Edison.

Some people might wonder why a bohemoth such as Google doesn’t show up on this list? Well, it seems that Google likes to focus on many data centers together on a campus, while Microsoft tends to go big, and the report only looks at individual buildings not campuses.

So how big are these?  Let’s put it in perspective:

1.1  million square feet is equivalent to just over 19 football fields

250 MW is equivalent to the average power use of about 200,000 American homes

These numbers really speak to the massive amount of computing needed in modern society, but this is actually not where the majority of energy use from data centers come from.  According to the US EPA’s 2007 report to Congress, only 38% of data center energy use in the US comes from “enterprise-class” data centers of greater than 5,000 SF.  The remaining 62% is used in the smaller data centers, which means that these smaller data centers offer the largest overall chance for energy savings in this industry.

Should Utilities Look at Data Centers to Achieve Increasing Efficiency Goals?

The market for energy efficiency is increasing, and more states and Public Utility Comissions (PUCs) are jumping on the bandwagon every day.  But where are these new electricity savings going to come from?

I recently stumbled on this ACEEE report (released in March 2009 and available here) covering the increased energy efficiency goals of many states.  As the paper summary says, “In just the last few years, energy efficiency has evolved from being largely a token gesture or a ‘public benefits’ set-aside, to being a top-priority utility system resource.”  As a result, many states (including Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Maryland and Vermont) were increasing their yearly efficiency goals to 1.5% – 2.0% a year, when “the very few top performing states in the nation were only achieving savings in the area of 0.8% per year.”  This fact makes these new savings goals look very aggressive.  In my mind this is a great thing because efficiency is the cleanest and cheapest form of capacity.

There are a few other interesting findings from this report, which reaffirm a couple persistent issues and trends in this industry:

1. “Energy efficiency spending was relatively balanced between the residential and non-residential sectors (median across the states of 44% and 56% respectively), but that savings were relatively skewed toward the non-residential sector (63% non- residential).”
2. “Also striking was the extent to which the lighting end use dominated the savings accomplishments, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all savings in the states which had disaggregated data available.  In the residential sector alone, lighting accounted for between 63% and 92% of reported savings.”

So let us summarize and distill what we have learned so far:

1. States are looking very aggressively to energy efficiency as part of their resource planning, with rapidly increasing goals.
2. The bulk of this savings is coming from non-residential (e.g., Agricultural, Commercial, and Industrial) measures.
3. Lighting makes up the vast majority of achieved savings.

So this begs my initial question – where are these new savings going to come from?

As the price of efficient lighting comes down, and customers are increasingly happy with the quality of new efficient lamp designs, how are utilities going to continue to squeeze savings out of an increasingly saturated market?  Like squeezing juice from an orange, at some point the effort needed increases faster than the juice keeps coming.  To make matters worse for utility programs, as the federal government gets in the mix, new legislation could eventually phase out much of the inefficient lighting.  This increases the baseline lighting efficiency and makes it more difficult to claim large savings for lighting projects.

Since the majority of savings typically come from the non-residential sector, it seems logical to focus on these industries for more savings. And, where better to look than some of the most energy dense facilities there are – data centers!  Studies indicate that data centers are up to 40 times more energy intensive than typical office buildings and that savings potential can run from 25% – 50% per facility.  This all adds up to a very concentrated opportunity for energy savings.  Sure there are a number of challenges to utility incentives in this space, but what other industries and facility types are utilities going to look to in order to achieve these kind of increased savings goals? To me, this speaks to a large need to investigate and to learn to overcome the challenges to utilities creating incentives for energy efficiency in data centers.

Data-Driven Prescriptive Incentives for Data Centers

I’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing information on utility data center energy efficiency programs for a presentation I’m putting together for AFCOM Data Center World, and have been struck by how few prescriptive programs (or “deemed measures”) are available for data center equipment. The few programs that do exist seem to vary widely and are distributed among different utilities around the country.

The most important information you need for creating these programs are data on which to base your assumptions and calculations, including, data on the typical products in the market (or the baseline) and data on the more efficient offerings.  The delta between these two establishes the energy savings on which to base an incentive.  This was similar in my previous work developing specifications for the ENERGY STAR program for the EPA – the biggest problem was access to quality data of sufficient quantity to really understand the energy use of the products. This is a great strength of the ENERGY STAR program, because as a trusted third party they are able to pull in data from a number of different current, and sometimes future, products to get a real sense of how energy is used across different manufacturers.  When they are pulled together these EPA data sets often seem to be some of the best publically available data sets on the energy consumption of these products – a resource that is useful for the program, as well as for other advocates outside the program.

It seems that the utility industry lacks a similar mechanism to collect sufficient data to develop these prescriptive incentive programs for data center equipment.  The primary source of data seems to be data collected through demonstrations and custom incentive applications.  But the utility industry needs a large amount of data to maintain confidence that the prescriptive programs will deliver actual energy savings that they can reliably claim for their programs. However, the utility industry, like ENERGY STAR itself, has only recently taken the plunge into the data center industry.  A lot of programs have a random assortment of incentives they’ve given out for data centers – an efficient UPS here, an economizer there, a few virtual servers in the mix – and do not seem to be reaching the critical mass needed to gather the quantity of information needed to effectively develop prescriptive programs.

I think this turns into a chicken and egg problem. Utilities sometimes find it hard to get traction on their data center programs because they do not have the prescriptive programs that make it easy for the customer to participate, but without the data from participation in the programs they do not have the information needed to develop the prescriptive programs.  As usual, available data seems to be a bottleneck.  What is needed are some central depositories of data with mechanisms to develop intelligent incentives based on that data.  A lot of different groups and organizations have the potential to work toward this goal (and I believe are doing so), and it is an important goal as more prescriptive incentives would certainly help capture some of the energy savings potential which we all know exists in this industry. I’d be really interested to hear about any potential efforts in this area, so if anyone knows about anything fill me in!

Welcome to the EMI Data Center Blog!

Thanks for visiting the new Energy Market Innovations (EMI) data center blog. Over the years EMI has worked with clients to increase the effectiveness of energy efficiency programs through strategic consulting and evaluation.  Since joining EMI in July, I’ve been excited by the prospect of using my expertise to apply this focus to the growing industry of data centers and information technology (IT) equipment.

Various estimates indicate that data centers are currently responsible for 1.5 to 3.0% of the total electricity use in the US, and that energy use from these facilities is projected to continue at double digit yearly growth rates for the foreseeable future. Regardless of which estimates you believe, it is apparent that the energy use of these facilities is significant and continues to grow with the increased demand for digital services. Over the last few years many experts have collected lists of best practices and many vendors have released more efficient equipment, but more work has to be done to ensure that these practices and technologies are embraced and adopted throughout the industry.

This blog intends to provide a resource for professionals interested in energy efficiency in the data center market, with a focus on how to continue to develop intelligent and effective initiatives for increasing the market penetration of best practices and efficient technologies. This blog will initially focus on utility sponsored initiatives and endeavors to create a bridge of information between the electrical utility and data center industries.  Through this blog, we’ll be keeping you up to date with current news and trends with up to date commentary on how current happenings are applicable to the world of utility sponsored data center energy efficiency initiatives.

Enjoy.  And, of course, being a blog focused on innovation in the digital economy, we’d be remiss to not take advantage of the latest social networking tools.  So please join us via RSS Feeds, Twitter and LinkedIn.