Standard & Poor’s data center is greening and it’s largely due to the fact that the company – in an effort to reduce data center power consumption – will be using power generated by a “massive solar array being built at the New Jersey site owned by S&P’s parent company McGraw-Hill,” according to Data Center Dynamics piece.
NJR Clean Energy (News - Alert) Ventures has agreed to invest $60 million to build a 14.4MW solar array on a 50-acre plot of McGraw-Hill’s property in East Windsor, which houses a 180,000 square foot data center. Data Center Dynamics reported that the system will be installed in two phases by Advanced Solar Products, a New Jersey firm: “The first phase will bring half of the total capacity online in December, and the remaining capacity is expected to be up and running in March 2012.”
Environmental Leader reported that the McGraw-Hill Companies and NJR Clean Energy Ventures project, if built according to plan, will be the nation’s largest privately-owned, net-metered solar project.
Data Center Dynamics mentioned a couple other high-profile examples of greening corporate headquarters. Network vendor Brocade (News - Alert) has a 550kW solar system, data center infrastructure vendor Emerson launched a new corporate data center in St. Louis, with a 100kW solar array on its roof, and European colocation company Interxion (News - Alert) announced that its data center in Belgium uses a combination of solar, wind and hydroelectric generation capacity for 100 percent of its energy needs.
According to Environmental Leader, “The energy produced by the 14.1 megawatt solar system is expected to reduce the equivalent of about 10 percent of McGraw-Hill’s annual global carbon emissions and significantly lower the company’s long-term electricity costs.”
EnergyBoom writes that “New Jersey Resources expects the solar farm will eligible for a federal investment tax credit that will see 30 percent of its investment returned. Additionally, the company expects the energy produced at the facility to be eligible for Solar Renewable Energy Certificates which can be sold to utilities in New Jersey to meet their renewable energy requirements.”
Another company actively involved in the data center power space is Server Technology (News - Alert), a leading provider of data center monitoring technologies.
Recently, Server Technology, a global leader in power distribution products and power monitoring software, shared how its Sentry Power Manager serves as a one-stop shop for combating data center challenges such as improved uptime and increased power costs.
“Sentry Power Manager is currently being used in networks at some of the world’s largest companies,” Brandon Siri, senior marketing representative for Server Technology, told TMCnet in a recent interview. “With well over 225 installations of SPM in companies all over the world, SPM in conjunction with Sever Technology CDUs is allowing those businesses to gather the critical data they need to make smarter business decisions regarding their data centers.”