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Lydia Aouani of Natural Resources Canada speaks at DatacenterDynamics Toronto 2009
The Canadian government has pledged to only buy servers that are certified under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.
“It’s important because the federal government is a huge purchasing power,” said Lydia Aouani of Natural Resources Canada, a federal agency that aims to ensure sustainable development of the nation’s natural resources. “Soon, any server purchased by our government will be Energy Star (certified).”
Aouani presented at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Toronto on Tuesday.
The Canadian government has adopted the US EPA’s certification system for energy efficient appliances as have governments of several other nations, including the EU, Switzerland, Australia and Japan. Aouani’s agency (referred to as NRCan) manages the Canadian Energy Star program.
The agency also promotes energy efficiency audits like the one it has recently conducted in its own data center. It was completed in August of 2009, Aouani said.
Canada has set ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction targets and raising energy efficiency of the data centers in the country is considered part of the solution by the government. The goal is a 20-percent reduction in nationwide GHG emissions by the year 2020 and 60 percent by 2050.
Aouani cited a 2008 study that concluded that data centers use 0.6 percent of Canada’s electricity. There are about 800,000 servers installed in Canada and the facilities that house them consume 3,400 million kWh of electricity, resulting in exhaust of 830 kilotons of GHG-equivalent substances.
“If all data centers were using state of the art energy efficiency technologies, by 2011 we would go back to our electricity consumption levels of the year 2000,” she said said.
Related news: EPA to use Energy Usage Effectiveness to benchmark data center energy efficiency
Related video: Energy Star data center initiative update
Related conference: DatacenterDynamics Toronto 2009
Keywords: Energy Star, Natural Resources Canada, Canadian government, Energy Star servers, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emissions, climate change, global warming, data center energy use | | 
