JISC

Imperial College has committed to reducing carbon emissions by 20% by 2014 and runs a sustainability programme to engage with the College community, reduce waste and manage carbon footprint. Details of the programme can be found at http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/sustainability.

Imperial College took part in Phase 5 of the Carbon Trust's Higher Education Carbon Management (HE CM) Programme. There were eleven Higher Education Institutions taking part in Phase 5 of the programme, with a total annual energy bill of around £42 million equivalent to around 280,000 tCO2. The electricity and gas budget for Imperial College in 2008/09 was £16.9 million roughly equivalent to 76,400 tCO2. Thus Imperial College represents 27% of the total carbon emissions associated with this phase of the HE CM programme. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/facilitiesmanagement/energy/carbonmanagementprogra mme

As part of the Carbon Management Programme Estates Division and ICT identified 4 areas of improvement, 3 of which were converted into projects and are running now:

• desktop power management (project 9 of the CM programme)
• virtualisation (project 10)
• desktop replacement (project 11)

One project which still needs to be addressed is the computer room efficiency improvement (project 24).

It is a challenging project to try to retrofit solutions into the existing facility. So far two computer rooms have achieved PUE (Power Utilization Effectiveness) of 1.52 and 1.32 respectively. Proposed project will aim to consider different methods ("cold aisles", energy recover system, temperature adjustment and control) and model different scenarios and adverse effects of each in order to produce a feasible design to reduce PUE of the computer rooms. We anticipate a 5% reduction in power consumption.

This proposal will investigate a solution in three phases, first in identifying possible solutions, modelling and producing a report with recommendations, then by implementing recommendations and measuring their effectiveness. Reporting and dissemination is the last phase of the project.

It is hoped that this is a common challenge faced by other academic institutions and that the College's investigations will be of benefit to others looking to improve power efficiency of computer rooms in a sustainable and measurable way.