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News announcement7 June 2017

2017 EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres Awards won by SKY, ENGIE and Facebook

SKY, ENGIE, and Facebook are the winners of the 2017 EU Code of Conduct Award for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres
© SKY

On 6 June 2017, SKY, ENGIE, and Facebook received the 2017 EU Code of Conduct Award for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres. The ceremony took place during the Datacloud Conference in Monte Carlo, one of the largest conferences dedicated to data centres in Europe.

The Code of Conduct is an independent scheme in the EU to certify that a data centre has adopted energy efficiency best practices. Data centres measure their energy efficiency in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The ideal value is 1 PUE, but the average PUE value is around 2.0.

The winning data centres have been selected out of 25 data centres which applied for the Code of Conduct programme in the period May 2016 - April 2017, based on significant reduction of their energy consumption through the adoption of best practices.

The companies used a combination of the following energy saving technologies to increase their power usage effectiveness: open compute project installation, hot aisle contained airflow solutions, adiabatic cooling, thermal wheel free cooling and harvesting of rainwater.

Energy efficiency targets are complemented by general commitments to monitor power and energy consumption, adopt management practices, switching off components not needed, and reducing energy consumption where possible.

And the winners are…

SKY – for their data centre Ajax 1 in Slough, United Kingdom, with PUE of 1.25. They use hot aisle contained airflow solution and adiabatic cooling.

ENGIE Services Zuid – for their data centre in Maastricht, The Netherlands, where the thermal wheel free cooling and the harvesting of rainwater led to PUE of 1.28.

FACEBOOK – for their data centre in Lulea, Sweden. This very large and very efficient data centre, with PUE of 1.1, is running an open compute installation, and does not use conventional chillers.

Background

The Code of Conduct for Data Centres was created in response to the increasing energy consumption in the commercial sector. It is a voluntary initiative managed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, with the aim to reduce energy consumption through ambitious energy efficiency measures.

The aim is to inform and stimulate data centre operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner by improving the understanding of energy demand within the data centre, raising awareness, and recommending energy efficient best practices and targets.

354 data centres have requested to join the EU Code of Conduct since the start of the programme in 2008 and 315 have been approved as participants. In addition there are 248 endorsers in the programme, who are vendors, consultants or industry associations.

All participants have the obligation to continuously monitor energy consumption and adopt energy management in order to look for continuous improvement in energy efficiency. One of the key objectives of the Code of Conduct is that each participant benchmarks their efficiency overtime, using the Code of Conduct metric (or available alternatives) to have evidence of continuous improvements in efficiency.

Related Content

Additional link: Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres

Details

Publication date
7 June 2017