Agencies strive to meet ambitious energy conservation goals

When President Bush signed the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act last December, he said he wanted federal agencies to "lead by example in efficiency and renewable energy use." That was an understatement.

The law requires agencies to cut fossil fuel consumption by 55 percent in new and renovated buildings by 2010. By 2030, federal facilities are to be carbon neutral, meaning they will not consume more energy than they produce.

"That is a major stretch," said David Winstead, commissioner of the Public Buildings Service at the General Services Administration, speaking Wednesday at a Government Executive-sponsored panel discussion on green government.

GSA owns or leases 352 million square feet of office space in about 8,600 buildings in the United States. Between 2003 and 2007, Winstead said, GSA measured a 6 percent reduction in energy consumption at federal facilities. The agency expects to help drive the market for more energy-efficient systems and materials with its annual construction budget of $1.3 billion, he said.

"We do have the money so that when we're renovating a building we do include renovation of [heating and air conditioning] systems, window glazing, and roofing and all these other things to get to those goals by 2030. That's our objective," Winstead said.

"Funding will be an issue" with older buildings, said Boyd Rutherford, the Agriculture Department's assistant secretary for administration and a participant on the panel. USDA's headquarters building in Washington, where Rutherford has an office, was built in 1903, he noted. "It was not designed with the modern electronics and systems that are in place now. The data centers that have proliferated are big energy hogs," he said.

The growing demand for computer resources during the past five years has doubled the energy consumption of data centers, driving up costs and greenhouse gas emissions and straining the power grid, according to a report to Congress by the Environmental Protection Agency last fall.

There are a number of things managers can do to reduce energy consumption at data centers, said Anil Karmel, a solutions architect at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, in a separate interview.

By using server virtualization technology, Karmel and his colleagues were able to decommission 105 of 400 servers at Los Alamos, saving about 873,000 kilowatts of energy use per year. That translated to savings of about $605,000 in the first year, and is expected to result in $1.4 million in annual savings in the future, he said.

Data center energy consumption is a growing concern across government, says Andy Lausch, senior director of federal sales for CDW-G, a technology products and services firm with corporate headquarters in Vernon Hills, Ill. A recent survey by the company of corporate and government information technology executives found that federal agencies were more likely than companies or other organizations to have formal policies guiding their purchasing decisions relative to energy consumption.

"Federal agencies know relatively more than [other entities] about what steps they can take to improve their energy efficiency," Lausch said. Not surprisingly, officials with direct knowledge of, or responsibility for, utility costs are far more likely to have strategies in place to effectively manage power demand and energy consumption, he said.