'Low' Energy Plan Fond Du Lac WI

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."

He adds that equipment doesn't have to run at 55° F, that it can operate very well at 72° F.

Perhaps the best measurement is the data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) because it is the only metric compliant with the recommendations of the August 2007 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report to Congress on data center efficiency. DCiE expresses electrical efficiency of a data center as the fraction of the total electrical power supplied to the data center that is ultimately delivered to the IT load. The goal is to maximize DCiE because higher efficiency means less wasted power.

For an application for Sun Microsystems, 18 hot-aisle containment systems were installed in Sun's new software research data center. The 18 hot-aisle containment systems use a total of 450 enclosures. Each hot-aisle containment system operates at an average of 5 kW of heat load per rack and utilizes a cooling solution to cool the load. Cooling capacity is pre-piped to enable placement of additional cooling units into each data center system, bringing the overall cooling capacity to a 9 kW average per rack.

"Basically what it comes down to is applying existing technology in different ways to attain greater efficiency," Cottuli explains. "These are all tried-and-true technologies that are being used."

Basically, power consumption reduction for IT systems consists of several approaches, according to APC:

1. Operational actions: retiring systems, operating existing systems in an efficient manner and migrating to more energy efficient platforms.
2. Planning actions: virtualization and standardization.

By retiring systems, powering old technologies down or taken off line can help reduce power consumption by as much as 20 percent. In addition, when a new server deployment is planned, the use of blade servers as opposed to alternative server form factors can provide a 20 percent reduction in power consumption.

APC studies claim that virtualization of servers results in a dramatic reduction of IT power requirements and that virtualization almost always dramatically reduces the number of installed servers. The cost savings can be around $400 a year per server eliminated.

Standardization on energy efficient servers is a very effective approach, APC says. Blade servers are the most electrically efficient form of server, though available blade types for a given blade server system can vary dramatically in performance and power consumption.

"There are plenty of opportunities for business and for electrical contractors to bring extra value to their clients," Cottuli notes. "Electrical contractors are key contributors/partners in getting the job done."

Lighting panelboards

Just as important as managing data centers is the ability to manage lighting through the lighting panelboard. While they are standard systems, and units electrical contactors are very familiar with, lighting panelboards still play an important function.

"Intelligent" panelboards are key today. They can do more and play a vital role in managing lighting and energy costs. "Intelligence breakers can separate circuits for different lighting systems and needs," says Scott Jordan, product marketing manager, Insulation Systems and Contols, Square D. "They also provide remote breaker function and they act as an effective communication bus."

Not only do lighting panelboards provide energy savings, but they also can prolong the life of the lighting equipment. HID track lighting is expensive, for instance, but through the automation via the intelligent panelboard, the lights can be used less and more effectively. These boards also enable greater zoning opportunities. While Jordan says lighting zones are relatively routine in regard to operation, installation and maintenance, they can provide some complications—especially in retrofit applications. But the energy savings can be significant—as much as 30 percent, according to Jordan.

Historically, a panelboard has been viewed as a gray box. However, today's advanced lighting control systems have transformed this common gray box into the hub of an intelligent system that provides a connection between the lighting system, lighting control input devices and the facility's power management system.

Some panelboards also contain Web-enabled controllers that initiate commands made through the facility's Local Area Network (LAN) and remotely operate circuit breakers, relays and dimming modules, turning lights on and off according to occupancy, schedules or load shed commands. Intelligent panelboards are even being used in conjunction with critical power systems to shed non-essential loads in the event of a power outage.

Another feature is the ability to integrate the lighting control system with other building systems. Sub-metering equipment is often connected to the intelligent lighting control panelboard through the panelboard's serial port. In addition to providing the ability to adjust schedules remotely, facility managers can view operational status, power consumption and demand at any time, whether onsite or at home, anytime of the day or week. Some systems are also savvy enough to automatically send an e- mail to the facility manager when a breaker trips, a re-lamping project should be instituted, an unauthorized override occurs or any one of multiple pre-set parameters.

The benefits are many. First is the energy savings. There also are the requirements of LEED certification. Removing a heat source in a building by better lighting operation or even dimming lights also saves on energy and has shown to improve worker productivity, Jordan explains.

"It's pretty easy and routine work for contractors, but important and necessary work," Jordan adds. "And contractors can follow up on the service. "