ECPZone.com |

After payroll, energy costs generally run as the second highest cost factor for most businesses. Whether it's lighting, data centers, heating and air conditioning, those costs add up — especially as energy costs keep going up with no end in sight. Therefore, it's becoming vital that businesses look to ways to conserve energy and the costs associated with it.

Data centers and lighting are two areas in particular that eat up energy. While lighting is not cheap, there has been headway in making it more affordable. New lighting technologies and controls have shown to be successful in managing energy usage. This article will examine managing the lighting panelboard later. First, is a more formidable task: the electrical power costs over the life of a data center.

Data centers

Businesses — life, for that matter — cannot operate today without computers, and with computers comes data storage. The main data center not only requires a lot of energy to run, but also needs to be cooled because those units generate a lot of heat. Cooling units that generate much heat also requires much energy.

According to a white paper from APC, "Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centers," electrical power costs over the life of a data center may exceed the costs of the electrical power system, including the UPS. It also may exceed the costs of the IT equipment. The white paper states the reasons as being:

• The billed electrical costs come after the charges are incurred and are not clearly linked to any particular decisions or operating practices.
• Tools for modeling the electrical costs of data centers are not widely available and are not commonly used during data center design.
• The billed electrical costs are often not within the responsibility or budget of the data center operating group.
• The electrical bill for the data center may be included within a larger electrical bill and may not be available separately.
• Decision-makers are not provided sufficient information during planning and purchasing decisions regarding the electrical cost consequences.

However, these costs can be managed. In fact, the white paper says, "simple no-cost decisions made in the design of a new data center can result in savings of 20 percent to 50 percent of the electrical bill, and with systematic effort up to 90 percent of the electrical bill can be avoided."

The goal is to integrate power, cooling, management and services in a rack-optimized architecture to maximize available energy use, the abilities of all the equipment involved, while reducing costs. And it pretty much can be done by using existing technologies and equipment. In other words, the ultimate key is the design.

Solutions can include removal of the AC transformer from the AC power distribution. This provides a benefit because it removes the need to cool the transformer, which negates any Btu losses, says Carl Cottuli, vice president, APC Data Center at the Schneider Electric Technology Center in O'Fallon, Mo. "We are transferring heat out of the data center," he adds. "The use of remote power panels, for instance, is one solution."