Drive to cut waste

In 2013 the European Commission launched a pilot scheme likely to lead to a new set of regulations intended to reduce the environmental footprint of data centres. The pilots aim to develop an EU-wide standard measurement of the environmental performance of products throughout their life cycles, from shoes to solar panels. The process will lead to what the Commission calls Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR), driven by the wider directive `Building a Single Market for Green Products´. Although many of the pilots are concerned with foodstuffs and consumer goods, several are focusing on issues that affect data centres, particularly the environmental cost of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), with others looking at servers within the wider context of IT equipment and the batteries that may go into the UPS subsystems. the paper discusses that the European Union is keen to measure the energy efficiency of the power systems inside data centres.