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US Data Centers Wary of Sharing Energy Data With Feds
1sockchuck writes "The EPA has been seeking at least 100 data center operators willing to share data about their energy usage to help the government develop an Energy Star program for data centers. Thus far, only 54 data centers have signed up, which suggests that few data center operators are eager to tell the government exactly how much energy they are using. The EPA issued a report to Congress last year on data center power usage, and is already developing an Energy Star program to rate servers. Can a program designed to rank the energy efficiency of appliances and computer monitors be a useful tool in addressing the enormous energy consumption of data centers?"
Are reasoning and math lost skills, even on a site tagged "news for nerds"?
They are seeking "at least 100 data centers" to participate.
It DOES NOT SAY that they asked 100. They have put out a general request for datacenters of 1000 square feet or more.
So, out of all the data centers in the US that are over 1000 square feet, only 54 have agreed to participate. That is NOT 54/100 or 54%, it is a drop in the bucket, and it does seem to indicate a reluctance to participate. Although it could just as easily be apathy.
I hope you're joking
Data centers have to know how much they're using as they have to have sufficient UPS backup to keep their systems running in the event of street power outage.
Groups that maintain these data centers also wind up paying the electric bills, so even if they don't know how much is actually in use at ant single point in time, it's pretty easy to look at a few bills and see what the usage over the past 30 days were.