DOE awards $47m in funding to advance energy efficiency in the IT sector

7 January 2010

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $47m for 14 projects across the country to support the development of energy efficiency improvement in the information technology (IT) and communication technology sectors.

‘These Recovery Act projects will improve the efficiency of a strong and growing sector of the American economy. By reducing energy use and energy costs for the IT and telecommunications industries, this funding will help create jobs and ensure the sector remains competitive,’ said US Energy Secretary Steven Chu. ‘The expected growth of these industries means that new technologies adopted today will yield benefits for many years to come.’

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is providing funding for research, development and demonstration projects in three subject areas including equipment, power supply chain and cooling.

The DOE said the equipment and software projects will focus on the core components of a data or telecommunications center, such as servers and networking devices as well as software to optimise equipment energy use. The power supply chain projects will develop technologies to minimise power loss and heat generation and the cooling projects will seek to demonstrate ways to cool IT equipment to work more effectively.

The $47m in federal funds for the projects will be matched by more than $70m in private industry funding, for a total project value of more than $115m.

Power Assure, which received a $5m award, estimates its new power management software, which more efficiently regulates server energy usage by turning servers off and on when needed, could reduce energy use by 50 per cent in data centers and large server farms.

The largest award of $9.9m was given to Yahoo! to develop a cooling system, followed by a $9.3m award given to SeaMicro for an equipment and software project.

IT and telecommunications facilities account for around three per cent of all US electricity use.

Copyright © 2010 NewNet

Tags: energy efficiency

This story was published on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 4:26 pm and is filed under North America, deals, energy efficiency. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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