SANTA CLARA, CA — Colocation and IT services provider Bay Area Internet Solutions (BAIS) today announced that it had received the maximum refund incentive from its electric utility for energy efficiency measures at its newest data center.

The company landed a $750,000 rebate check from Silicon Valley Power as part of the utility's Customer Directed Rebate program.

BAIS earned the rebate for its work on a new 83,000 square foot data center facility, which was designed with green and energy efficiency in mind.

"We are very proud to have built a data center that actually surpassed the SVP energy efficiency requirements in order to qualify for their maximum incentive rebate," BAIS president and CEO, Tom Wye, said in a statement. "We have constructed one the most technologically advanced co-location facilities, including an innovative economizer design to accommodate today's growing customer demands for high-density power coupled with efficient and consistent cooling requirements."

Among the steps BAIS took to earn the rebate are:

• An innovative economizer construction that saved as much as 75 percent of the facility's cooling costs;
• the installation of precision cooling systems from Emerson Network Power, which uses 35 percent less energy than comparable CRAC units;
• and a cold-aisle containment system that reduces energy use by 70 percent over uncontained rows.

Rebates for energy efficiency are increasingly common, especially those targeting data center facilities, which can be huge energy suckers.

Among the largest rebates to date include a $1.4 million rebate to NetApp from Pacific Gas & Electric; Fortune Data Centers' $900,000 energy efficiency rebate; and a rebate to the city of Walnut Creek, Calif., for its IT energy efficiency project.