Plenty of ways to win through green initiatives

OK, so they’re not called Flexys; they’re called the Flex Your Power (FYP) awards, and FYP doles them out each year to organizations demonstrating leadership in energy efficiency, either through in-house initiatives or product innovation. The fifth annual award ceremony took place last weekend at Eco Live 2007, in San Francisco.

Although the awards have been around for five years, there was a striking difference, to me, anyway, between previous years’ recipients and this year’s: the number of IT companies that came away winners has risen. Winners included Adobe, Cisco, HP, Qualcomm, and Sun, while AMD was a runner-up.

The shift toward more IT companies in the FYP winners’ circle shouldn’t be too surprising, though. As noted by Wally McGuire, the director at FYP, tech companies require a large amount of energy, and power costs in this industry are incredibly high — and getting higher. Thus, the ability to use power efficiently, so as to ensure uptime and reduce bills, is central to their success. The California power crisis of 2001 was also a wake-up call for plenty of organizations, McGuire noted.

So IT companies are inventing new ways to deal more effectively with energy costs and usage — not just in the datacenter but with consolidation, virtualization, and the like. Rather, many of these companies undertook an abundance of facility upgrades, including overhauls to increase the efficiency of heating and cooling, as well as lighting and water usage.

Let’s start with Adobe. Last year, as part of its “Greening of Adobe” project, the company earned Platinum-level LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for three of its HQ buildings in San Jose. The company created and implemented a rather sophisticated, integrated building monitoring and control system, allowing staff to handle the controls for various building operating systems from a single UI. Lighting zones, for example, can be turned off and on with a single click of a mouse; HVAC temperatures can be adjusted with another click. Now that’s slick.

Adobe reports that it managed to save some $1,182,000 — and 9,200,000 kWh — from its efforts, representing 30 percent of total electricity use.

According to Randy Knox, Adobe’s senior director of Global Facilities Services, the infamous California brownouts of 2001 indeed helped to spur the 64 projects that comprise the “Greening of Adobe.” “During the California energy crisis, the governor asked large electricity users to reduce energy consumption by 10 percent. From the start, Adobe was determined to go further,” he says. “To date, Adobe has successfully reduced electricity usage by 35 percent, natural gas by 41 percent, domestic water by 22 percent, landscape irrigation by 76 percent, and diversion of solid waste through composting and recycling by nearly 90 percent.”

Like Adobe, Qualcomm’s realized some impressive energy and cost savings with facility upgrades, in this case to its San Diego-based Building W Campus, an LEED Gold candidate building. (Qualcomm also earned an FYP award last year.) Renovations included installing a photovoltaic (solar power) system that supports 60 percent of campus lighting requirements and offsets demand during peak periods.

It also added efficient faucets, flush valves, shower heads, plus an increase in cycles of chilled water circulation, saving 670,000 gallons of water annually. The campus has incorporated high-efficiency lighting fixtures, gas absorption chillers, boilers, and water heaters. All in all, the company reports to have reaped savings of 9,668,000 kWh last year – 30 percent of total electricity use.

According to Alan Ball, Qualcomm director of business services for the company’s real estate and facilities department, the company’s efforts prove downright inspiring to the company’s employees. “We find that employees are proud of our initiatives to reduce energy usage. In fact, we offer facilities tours to interested employees, and some have gone on to install solar power systems on their own homes,” he says.

Also on the list of winners: Cisco. The networking giant completed quite a few upgrades to its San Jose campus, projects which it says will cut electricity usage by more than 14,000,000 kWh and gas consumption by 100,000 therms. Combined, Cisco’s 2006 projects will cut GHG emissions by more than 40 million pounds. That translates to more than $1,500,000 in cost savings.

Cisco has made major upgrades at its San Jose campus, including installing VFD (variable frequency drive) chillers in numerous buildings and upgrading its HVAC controls.

The company also launched an employee education program to encourage energy conservation and a campus-wide recycling program, which the company says saves an estimated 35,000,000 kWh when compared to the energy required for landfill disposal and new product manufacturing.

On the innovative products and services side, HP secured an FYP trophy by producing the first business systems on the market that are configurable to meet the Energy Star 4.0 standards. (For reasons I don’t entirely grasp, HP is making a point of not saying that the systems are compliant with the standard, since said standard isn’t official yet.) Nevertheless, according to the company, these can save as much as 52 percent of power use over traditional machines when properly configured.

HP was also the first company to enable all business PCs with S3 power management to automatically switch machines to standby during times of inactivity. “For every twelve desktop computers that have the energy-savings mode enabled, that’s like taking a car off the road for a year,” according to John Frey, HP’s manager of corporate environmental strategies.

Finally, Sun came away with an innovative products and services award, apparently for its energy-efficient Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, with CoolThreads technology, released back in 2005, as well as for its Open Work program, through which nearly half of Sun’s 40,000 employees work from home whenever possible to avoid commuting. The company provides consulting services, instructing other organizations on how to implement flexible work programs.

For more information about the Flex Your Power awards, go to www.fypower.org/feature/awards/.