Sentilla Blog

Digital Realty Trust (DRT) announced this week that one of their Santa Clara data centers has been awarded LEED-gold certification. There has been much debate over LEED certification and its role in the data center -- many LEED-platinum buildings have received an exemption from the USGBC to ignore data center energy in the LEED-platinum certification procedure.

DRT's new data center at 1500 Space Park in Santa Clara (located in a building previously occupied by Analog Devices) has also received incentives from Silicon Valley Power for verifiable steps they've taken to reduce the energy consumed by their data centers compared to industry averages. These rebates are estimated between $750,000 and $1,000,000 for the Santa Clara location. In a discussion I had with Mark Bramfitt at PG&E, he confirmed that they too are offering significant incentives for data centers that come to PG&E with verifiable kilowatt-hour savings. Incentive rates for 2009 are typically $0.05 to $0.15 per kwh saved, according to PG&E.

With the Carbon Reduction Commitment (now CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme) turned into a flat tax and delayed by a year, many are questioning whether carbon regulation is real.  Last year, Mike Manos described a doomsday "CO2K" scenario similar to Y2K.  Now that some time has passed, governments have changed, and we've interviewed data center operations about the impact of carbon regulation, I'm weighing in on the issue.  Let's put it this way -- unless carbon tax is about FIVE TIMES the cost of electricity, there's no financial motivation to change behavior.  That means CO2K is more likely to be like Y2K -- essentially a lot of hype but ultimately a bust. Check out the video blog below, or at Data Centre Solutions.