The Public Energy Efficiency Register of Data Centers (PeerDC) aims to create a user-centric evaluation metric for assessing energy efficiency and sustainability in data centers. Learn how co-location providers and data centers can benefit here.
Increasing digitization - through trends such as 5G, edge computing and AI - means that the demand for IT infrastructures and data centers continues to rise. Since this growth is accompanied by immense energy consumption, there is an explicit target from the new German government to make data centers climate-neutral, increase efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions by 2027. That's a proud goal, considering that we currently consume 16 to 17 billion kWh of electricity annually in the data center sector. And the trend is rising.
Why is there a need for a nationwide rating system for energy-efficient data centers?
The overriding problem is that the utilization of IT and infrastructure rarely reaches 100%. This means that inefficiency is inevitable. In order to be able to seriously define potential savings, reliable data and uniform parameters are needed. At present, however, there are no comparable figures and no statistics on the energy consumption and efficiency of data centers. Values such as PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) are too simplistic and are not sufficient for this analysis.
This is where the PeerDC project comes in, which has set itself the goal of creating a practical data center register. Following a call for tenders by the Federal Environment Agency, the Data Center Group has been appointed to this task together with the University of Stuttgart, the Öko Institut Berlin, Vogel IT, DENEFF and GDA.
What is the goal of PeerDC?
In order to define and implement effective measures for reducing the energy consumption of the digital infrastructure, the registry is to create the appropriate basis. The three goals of the project are:
- Development of a register for data centers and visualization of the contents of the register
- Development of a rating system and a rating software for energy-efficient -data centers
- Examination of the transferability of the results and feasibility of a rating system for data centers on a European level.
What does the Data Center Group contribute?
While the university and the Öko-Institut are busy with the development of the web platform, the Data Center Group helps to bring light into the darkness and supports with the development of practical parameters and their application. This is only possible with a sufficient information base. Together with our practical partners - selected customers and data center operators - we determine relevant input values from which the key figures are later derived. These values must fundamentally meet two requirements: they must be relevant for the evaluation and they must be disclosed by the practice partners. However, data protection is the top priority: The registry will collect and visualize emission values and energy indicators, among other things, without disclosing the exact location data of the data center.
How can data center operators and co-location providers participate and benefit?
The Peer DC has been running since October 2021 over 22 months until July 2023 and we are currently accepting more practice partners in the project. Sign up now and benefit from helping to shape the energy efficiency registry. Your advantage: by cooperating with us, you can help shape the criteria and be the first to benefit from the results. Because in the future, co-location customers and tenants of data center space will pay more attention to purchasing sustainable services. Especially since this is also increasingly becoming a political and legal requirement. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to shape the evaluation system, to be one of the first companies to be certified and to be able to advertise with a certified sustainable service. You can login here: https://peer-dc.de/wirken-sie-mit/
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