November 16, 2007—In an effort to help clients benchmark and improve efficiency of their IT operations and reduce their environmental impact, IBM recently announced what it says is the industry’s first corporate-led initiative to enable clients to earn energy efficiency certificates for reducing the energy needed to run their data centers.
The certificates earned, based on energy use reduction verified by a third-party, for the first time provide a way for businesses to attain a certified measurement of their energy use reduction—a key, emerging business metric, notes IBM. The certificates can be traded for cash on the growing energy efficiency certificate market or otherwise retained to demonstrate reductions in energy use and associated CO2 emissions.
The Efficiency Certificates initiative engages Neuwing Energy Ventures to document and verify the energy savings a client achieves through implementing energy efficiency projects.
Energy efficiency projects can be identified using IBM’s data center evaluation offerings. An evaluation will result in recommendations clients can take, including implementing virtualization technologies to reduce the number of physical systems needed, and fixing data center design flaws, to reduce unnecessary power consumption.
IBM intends to make the Efficiency Certificates program available across its entire line of systems and storage offerings, beginning with System z and System p in 2007. The Efficiency Certificates will first be available in the US, and IBM hopes to expand participation to Europe in 2008.
For more information on IBM’s environmental initiatives, visit the company’s Environment Web page.
