Silicon Valley Power (SVP), the municipally owned and operated utility that provides energy to customers in Santa Clara, California, gave a total of US$1.2m in rebates for energy-efficiency measures taken by data center operators in its service area over the past 12 months.

Mary Medeiros McEnroe, a public-benefit program manager at SVP who is one of the people overseeing the data center energy efficiency rebate program, said rebates went to operators of 10 data centers that chose to install systems that would increase efficiency of their facilities during the utility’s last fiscal year. Collectively, these customers achieved 21.4m kWh in annual energy savings as a result of projects completed that year.

On 1 July, SVP entered its next fiscal year with a total of US$3m available to go out as rebates to data centers and other customers, Medeiros McEnroe said. Data centers usually account for about half of the total pool allocated for this purpose each year.

“[Data centers] typically end up with more than 50%, depending on the year,” she said. But, “we’ve seen as much as 75% going to the data center sector.”

The program’s purpose is to encourage customers to invest in better energy efficiency by helping offset additional costs of installing systems that are more energy efficient than the norm. While a general efficiency-incentive program has been in place for years, a data center-specific one was only developed last year, Medeiros McEnroe said.

There are 32 data centers in SVP’s 19-square-mile service territory the utility knows about. “On top of that, we have customers who have their own data rooms and data closets,” which also qualify for efficiency rebates, she said.

The most recent addition to SVP’s data center efficiency rebate program was an additional incentive for implementing smart controls, such as data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems. Successful implementation of a system like this can add $0.02 per 1kWh saved to a customer’s budget.

Beginning with the last fiscal year, SVP stopped giving rebates to operators that install airside economizers in new data centers. Those retrofitting an existing facility with an economizer will still get a rebate, but economizers in greenfield developments have become standard, Medeiros McEnroe said.

Find out the latest and meet who is who in the Silicon Valley data center market at the DatacenterDynamics San Francisco conference on 17 July.