UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) manufacturers have been given notice to submit comments to the new UPS guidelines being formulated under the Energy Star program no later than April 2, 2010.According to the guidelines of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):
These items are intended to provide the framework around which the EPA can develop an effective energy efficiency program for Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) devices in data center, small office/home office, and home entertainment applications. The principal objectives for this ENERGY STAR specification are threefold:
(1) To provide purchasers with the means to identify the most energy efficient UPS solutions for their specific end-use application,
(2) To provide tools and information to designers and managers looking to improve the efficiency of data center operations, and
(3) To provide uniform efficiency testing conditions and reporting criteria to enable an informed purchase decision and efficiency-oriented comparison of products. EPA will look to harmonize energy efficiency requirements, where appropriate, to minimize the number of competing standards in the marketplace.
(1) To provide purchasers with the means to identify the most energy efficient UPS solutions for their specific end-use application,
(2) To provide tools and information to designers and managers looking to improve the efficiency of data center operations, and
(3) To provide uniform efficiency testing conditions and reporting criteria to enable an informed purchase decision and efficiency-oriented comparison of products. EPA will look to harmonize energy efficiency requirements, where appropriate, to minimize the number of competing standards in the marketplace.
Now, in case you missed my post on APC Introduces Green Products, that was in 2008. APC redesigned their small UPS for in the home, home office and SMB spaces by providing a UPS now available in five models. Read the post because APC improved upon a good design, lowered the cost to operate the UPS and provided a cost benefit by adding the Master switch to fight phantom or vampire loads. While the scale of savings and size is small, don't ignore or dismiss this model. Your old batteries, inverters and generators are potential money pits that could be turned into gold mines with the adoption of greener standards.
UPS systems including conventional generators haven't seen radical improvements in efficiency. Maybe a Bloom Box will do the same thing as a generator but more efficiently, and then if flywheels could be reduced to form factors for homes and SMBs, then maybe we'll see flywheel battery backup. The EPA call for comments is great news because it formalizes the challenges of the entire UPS industry from home users to data centers to higher efficiency levels.
By the way--when you are done virtualizing your servers, don't forget to resize your batteries and generator requirements even though you may still keep the old batteries and generator. You need to know what the right configuration should look like because that old generator may turn out to be too big. In our adventures with energy, we obtained quotes for a generator to serve our entire load. Previously the cost was $35k and now we're looking at $20k to do the same thing. Efficiency is still the leading payoff even in a really small configuration.
