The DOE Joins The Green Grid

The Green Grid and the U.S. Department of Energy will work together to develop a common set of best practices, terminology and tools to promote increased energy efficiency in U.S. data center facilities. The Green Grid and the DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy signed a memorandum of understanding today at an industry roundtable in Manhattan which included major data center users and vendors. The Green Grid is a non-profit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

"The memorandum of understanding with the Department of Energy signals an important step for The Green Grid," said Roger Tipley, director of The Green Grid. "This collaboration will provide IT managers with a jointly-developed set of guidelines to help improve their energy efficiency in their data center."

The Department of Energy has been working with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop benchmarks for energy efficiency for data centers. As part of that effort, the EPA is creating Energy Star efficiency ratings for servers, and pursuing a similar metric to rate the energy usage of entire data center facilities. The Green Grid's Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric is being considered as the facility-level benchmark for that program.