The Energy Department is using federal energy savings performance contracts to reach sustainability goals.
Jake Wooley, deputy director of the department’s information technology management office, told Nextgov.com these contracts “in the past have been something the facilities managers and energy managers have been aware of, but this is the first time in IT.”
Wooley said the department is calling it “a proof of concept.” DOE has contracted Lockheed Martin to offer an preliminary investigation to demonstrate where the department can save money, and how much, through a data center consolidation.
This is all part of a governmentwide data center consolidation program, with data centers growing from 438 in 1998 to more than 2,000 today.
The OMB launched the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative in 2010, which requires federal agencies to take a hard look at energy consumption among their facilities and aims to close 800 centers by 2015.
“What we need from the government is participation and engagement in the project-development process,” said Greg Caplan, Lockheed Martin’s senior manager for energy performance contracting. “We can only make recommendations based on our understanding of government priorities, and, of course, the universe of possibilities the engineers make available to us.”
Netxgov reports the OMB consolidation program is looking for an agency to recoup expenses through energy savings over a 25-year period.
