Using This Site
This website provides a self-paced learning environment, focusing on energy efficiency opportunities in data centers. (We suggest viewing the short videos first.) The intended audience includes students (and teachers who may find ways to make alternate use of the content), facility designers and operators, as well as facility owners looking for a primer on the opportunities for controlling energy costs.
This approach to training differs from traditional "PowerPoint" strategies, which prescribe the order in which material is presented and dictate a single linear route through the material. This web-based format is quite different insofar as the user decides not only on the "starting point" of their inquiry, but also the route and pace of exploration. Extensive links among the elements offer multiple ways to discover information. A web environment also affords the ability to link users directly to supporting material, e.g. articles, data, tools, and organizations that provide further information.
Users gain knowledge of a 67-item energy efficiency best practices checklist, various tools to use in executing projects, and links to Resources for continued learning. We offer theoretical concepts as well as real-world case studies in which these concepts have been applied. Our emphasis is on the engineering strategies and their economic benefits.
In addition to "flat content", this site introduces users to a detailed Self-Benchmarking Guide for applying cutting-edge benchmarking methods to specific data centers and the Design Intent Tool (DIT) for organizing and documenting energy-efficiency design objectives, strategies, and metrics for verifying performance. We provide a ready-to-use template for the DIT that collects user-selected best practices into a customizable report. Users should download the design intent tool and modify the pre-set template to include the best practices that and performance benchmarks apply to an existing or planned data center of their choosing.
For those with access to existing data centers—or participants in the design of new ones—we directly link Exercises that allow you to test and apply the information applied here to real-world situations.
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