As part of a partnership with The Green Grid, the U.S. EPA made a number of small tweaks to how it managed one of its data centers, and ended up saving $15,000 per year in energy costs as a result.

That was one of the examples on offer today in a free webcast hosted by GreenBiz.com, and bringing together some of the industry leaders behind The Green Grid, an industry consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency in data centers.

"The data center itself has always been a capital asset, but it's becoming a fundamental business differentiator for almost any industry," explained John Tuccillo, a vice president at APC by Schneider Electric and the president of the Green Grid. "Essentially, the data center has become the epicenter of business value: It provides tremendous opportunities to improve your business and the flexibility of your business, and our focus on the data center looks at ways to provide that improvement throughout the value chain."

Tuccillo was joined by Christian Belady, the Principle Power & Cooling Architect at Microsoft's Global Foundation Services and the treasurer at The Green Grid, and GreenBiz.com Executive Editor Joel Makower in an hour-long conversation about managing the energy efficiency of data centers.

The conversation is archived here and will be available for free for the next 90 days.

The discussion focused on how The Green Grid has been working on developing and sharing the best practices for data center management, and how simply putting those practices in place can lead to big savings for very little expenditure.

A central focus of the event was an assessment that The Green Grid conducted as part of a partnership with the U.S. EPA to look at energy efficiency in one of the Agency's data centers in Virginia.

The chart below runs down the basics of how that partnership played out, and the big savings the EPA earned through this assessment.

The 20 percent improvement in efficiency resulted largely from gathering the low-hanging fruit; and based on industry estimates, if all of the 75,000 similarly sized data centers in the U.S. were able to put the same best practices in place, it would amount to a net savings of more than $1.1 billion in energy costs alone.

While Tuccillo and Belady were clear to say that The Green Grid has no plans to go into the assessment or IT services business, the EPA partnership taught both parties a significant amount about what it takes to implement an effective IT assessment.

In part, Belady said, that was due to the wide range of stakeholders that The Green Grid brought on board with the assessment: the building owner, members of the IT and Facilities departments, the property managers, the electrician who originally designed the data center, and the EPA representatives themselves, who stood to benefit directly from energy efficiency and cost savings improvements.

These groups, who are rarely brought together to discuss the issues that impact them all, was able to make the assessment successful, Belady explained.

"If you pull together the people who have a stake in that data center and start to take on the challenge of how to improve efficiency while improving productivity, the improvements that happen just from the initial discussions are just amazing," he said.

Other elements of today's webcast include a discussion of the free tools that The Green Grid has developed and made available to the public, many of which we've covered on GreenerComputing before. The tools include maps for free data center cooling opportunities, simple steps to reduce data center power consumption and the case study of the EPA's data center efficiency project. Many more tools and resources, as well as the free educational trainings the group has developed, are available online at TheGreenGrid.org.

To hear the full conversation, and to download the presentation materials, visit tinyurl.com/GreenBizGreenGridWebcast.