ComEd Offers Incentives to Lower Power Use
Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd), the utility company serving the Chicago area, has put in place financial incentives to help data center operators optimize power consumption. ComEd serves about 3.8 million customers in northern Illinois, or 70 percent of the state’s population. That includes 60 separate data centers. According to the utility, running a 24/7 data center places far more of a load on the electrical grid than a few homes running air conditioners. In fact, the power usage can equal up to 100 to 200 times that of a local business. As an incentive to reduce this load, ComEd said it would provide incentives of up to 7 cents per kWH saved, up to 100 percent of the incremental costs and 50 percent of the total cost of qualifying projects. A ComEd analysis suggests that the top four energy hogs within a data center are the chiller (33 percent of all power used), IT equipment (30 percent), the UPS (18 percent), and the computer room A/C unit, or CRAC (9 percent). ComEd plans on working with data-center operators to install new energy-efficient equipment, including variable speed drives for existing chillers, HVAC fans and pumps and packaged units, as well as pump and air compressor motors. Incentives for new, energy-efficient water- and air-cooled chillers are also available. "The reliance on digital technology to support virtually everything we do is increasing on an almost daily basis and businesses count on uninterrupted power to support all of that technology," said Val Jensen, ComEd's senior vice president of Customer Operations for ComEd, in a statement. "ComEd's reliability performance is already in the top third nationally and is on target to become even stronger due to investments we are making under the Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act (EIMA), so we offer data center customers the reliability they need and technical and financial support to run an energy efficient operation."