The European Commission has awarded €2.9m ($4m) to a group of manufacturers and developers to make data centres more energy efficient.
The project, called the GreenDataNet, aims for data centres to boost the use of renewable energy to 80% for urban data centres and decrease overall power usage. The project will monitor the energy usage of IT, power, cooling and storage technologies from rack level to data centre and wider networks.
The consortium is led by Eaton and involves the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Nissan, ICTroom, Credit Suisse, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and the University of Trento (UNITN).
The second angle of the project is to integrate PV generated power with energy storage to form a smart grid for the data centre that will allow for greater independence from the national grid. This will include exploring the potential of using batteries from electric vehicles within the smart grids.
Three test sites will be operated using the GreenDataNet ideas- one data centre in Switzerland, one in France that also has a large PV set up, and an IT centre in the Netherlands.
