Edwards moves forward with DOD's first ESPC data center consolidation

  • Published
  • By Kevin Elliott
  • AFCEC Public Affairs
TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  The Air Force Civil Engineer Center recently announced the energy service company selected to perform an investment-grade audit for an energy savings performance contract at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The project includes the first ESPC data center consolidation in the Department of Defense.

Schneider Electric was chosen to conduct the IGA, a significant step in the ESPC process.

"It is an honor to be selected by the Air Force to help it achieve data center consolidation with an ESPC," said Michael Reed of Schneider Electric's Buildings Business Federal Team. "Schneider Electric's data center expertise ensures Edwards will receive the deep energy retrofits it needs to reach its sustainability goals."

Edwards has hundreds of servers and miscellaneous telecommunications equipment in operation in multiple facilities across the base. By upgrading to more current hardware and improving processes, the plan is to reduce both energy usage and the amount of square footage used by information technology equipment at the base.

Energy will be saved through a sheer reduction in the number of servers, said John Broughton, ESPC project manager at AFCEC.

"From an energy perspective, think of a server as a heating element," he said. "If you reduce the number of elements in a building by several hundred, you consume less energy and necessarily make less heat, which means the cooling requirements and equipment for that building can be downsized. Consolidations like this create ancillary energy-saving benefits."

Because of the increasing pace of IT development and the large amounts of energy consumed by data centers across the Air Force, a third-party financed consolidation would be a meaningful success and a paradigm-shifting project for the Air Force, according to Broughton.

"The Air Force has many data centers around the country, and this is the first one to be consolidated using the ESPC third-party financing model," he said. "So, Air Force IT experts are watching to see how this project goes and will then, if all goes well, duplicate the process for their centers."

In August 2010, the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative was created to reverse the historic growth of federal data centers.  The Secretary of Defense mandated the consolidation of DOD IT infrastructure to achieve savings in acquisition, sustainment and manpower costs. The purpose of consolidation is to optimize DOD computing centers and establish core data centers to support critical enterprise services, according to the DOD 2011 Data Center Consolidation Plan and Progress Report.

Executive Order 13693, released March 19, also addresses data center energy use as an ongoing concern. The implementing instructions for the EO state that centers that cannot achieve a power usage effectiveness, which is calculated by dividing the annual energy consumption of a data center by its yearly IT equipment energy use, of 1.5 should either be consolidated or closed.

However, current budget constraints make it difficult to fund data center consolidations at federal agencies, including the Air Force. So, the service decided to leverage third-party financing through energy savings performance contracts to accomplish the work.

"IT leaders are looking at this project and saying, 'If we can get this (data center consolidation) done through third-party financing, it will help our budgets and upgrade our equipment at the same time,'" Broughton said. "That would be significant."

Under the ESPC model, energy service companies compete to finance, design, construct and manage energy projects, and maintain the systems long-term. ESPCs range from 10 years to a maximum of 25 years, with the Air Force paying the ESCO back over the term of the contract from cost savings garnered by the higher-efficiency equipment.