Even though we're not covering the daily green IT news quite as often as we have in the past -- we've been focusing instead on more in-depth reporting on IT and other topics -- that certainly doesn't mean there's less happening in the green IT marketplace. In fact, it seems like there's more activity than ever when it comes to energy efficiency, green data centers, and e-waste management.

Below are some of the stories that landed on our radar in recent weeks.

Green Data Center News

• pair Networks' Green Data Center in the Desert If you're building a data center in the desert, you're going to need to make it as efficiently cooled as possible, and pair Networks has started work on what it calls the "most efficient data center in the world," in the desert of Las Vegas. The facility, profiled by Rich Miller, will use a combination of solar panels and an on-site cogeneration plant to draw essentially zero power from the grid. If everything goes according to plan, and the company is noticeably quiet about some of the tools they're using to build this facility, they hope to have a PUE of .96 -- a number that is possible only with on-site generation of energy.

• eBay's (Partially) Solar-Powered Data Center in the Mountains Using renewable energy to power your data center is still out of reach of most organizations -- although the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has pulled it off in Colorado Springs -- but eBay has put a 100 kilowatt solar array on its data center in Denver, Colo., to great effect. The solar panels run the non-IT loads of the building, including office space for 35 workers. And they generate more power than is needed, enabling the company to feed back into the grid and earn rebates for its contributions. All told, the solar panels will have paid for themselves in 3.5 years -- pretty quick for a renewable energy project.

• Facebook Says Tilera Chips are 3x More Efficient than Intel Facebook, the ever-elusive, ever-captivating IT giant of the moment, said this week that it's using Tilera 64-core chips to power its servers, and that as a result, it's getting 3x the performance per watt than Intel x86 chips, and 4x the performance over AMD chips.

• 100 Percent Free Cooling in New York City? A video from the Uptime Institute (by way of Data Center Knowledge) profiles how Deutsche Bank has managed to get 100 percent free outside-air cooling in the middle of New York City.

 

 

E-Waste News

After one of my regular e-waste roundups earlier this month, there have been a number of interesting developments on the topic, all of which center around the e-Stewards Certification.

First up, Electronics Recyclers International (ERI) announced that they had received company-wide e-Stewards certification. The news came after years of ERI being one of the companies that had signed onto the non-binding e-Stewards pledge, and during which time one of the company's contractors got caught exporting e-waste overseas, a move that violates the e-Stewards Pledge.

In the process of working toward an e-Stewards certification, Intercon Solutions ended up becoming the first company to be denied certification, after the Basel Action Network, which administers the certification, uncovered "compelling evidence" that Intercon was exporting waste to Hong Kong.

And finally, BAN today announced that LG has become the first company to commit to global e-Stewards recycling for all of its e-waste. We'll have more on this in the coming days, but for now it looks like LG has pushed ahead yet again on its sustainability commitments with the e-Stewards move.

Have you seen other notable green IT stories? Let me know in the comments below or by email.