Bringing Energy Efficiency to Silicon Valley—
and Our Customers

As a leader in the utility industry, PG&E works with a number of companies to help them advance energy-efficient products and services. One of our most fruitful partnerships has brought us together with Sun Microsystems. Last year, we certified Sun's new energy-efficient servers and created a purchaser rebate plan for the computers. This innovative program has helped spur sales for Sun's cutting-edge servers, reduced energy use in technology data centers and motivated other major computer manufacturers to embrace energy efficiency—which will ultimately benefit PG&E's customers, California's and the country's economy and the environment.

Mark Bramfitt, a principal program manager at PG&E, is responsible for the breakthrough relationship with Sun. He also reaches out to three key industries—high-technology, healthcare and biotechnology—in an effort to design and develop energy-efficiency programs that will make a real difference for PG&E customers.

Dave Douglas, Vice President for Eco Responsibility at Sun, joined forces with PG&E and oversees the computer maker's environmental and sustainability efforts.

Is the technology sector gobbling up a disproportionate share of energy?

Bramfitt: Information technology is still growing rapidly and the data centers are crowded with computers. There's not a lot of cooling or air flow in these critical places and the power capacity is being stretched significantly. PG&E serves Silicon Valley. We wanted to offer technology executives some sort of help here. Our customers need our best solutions.

Douglas: The technology industry is in an interesting spot today. Our products are essential to economic growth—whether they help optimize supply chains, stimulate productivity or enable e-business. But computers use lots of energy. So we are part of the solution and part of the problem. At Sun, our goal is to maximize technology's possible uses and minimize its negative impacts. Energy reduction is a big part of that. And that's why we initially raised awareness about the importance of energy efficiency in late 2005. We've tried to carry this through to our products since then.

What does the PG&E—Sun partnership really mean?

Bramfitt: Sun is clearly a leader. They saw these issues early and began designing an energy-efficient server. This has changed the way the technology industry thinks. It's changed the standards. Before, it was how fast and how big the computer was. Now, it's how fast, how big and how energy efficient. People are thinking about cooling and capacity today because of Sun.

Last year, we certified Sun's new energy-efficient servers and created a purchaser rebate plan for the computers. This innovative program has helped spur sales for cutting-edge servers, reduced energy use in data centers and motivated other major computer manufacturers to embrace energy efficiency—which will ultimately benefit PG&E's customers, California's and the country's economy and the environment.

Douglas: PG&E has tremendous vision and has exercised tremendous leadership on the energy-efficiency issue. We couldn't do this alone. Mark and his team are using incentives to steer people toward technology products that make sense in today's environment. Our Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers are powered by our Ultra SPARC T1 processor. This combination means the servers can do a lot at once, operate even faster and still burn less power.

In terms of energy efficiency, is Sun influencing the technology industry the way Toyota seems to be doing in the automotive world?

Douglas: Toyota and Sun are both investing in innovation to help address the energy-efficiency issue.

It's early, but are there any results stemming from the PG&E-Sun alliance that we can report?

Bramfitt: At this point, we're running more than four times ahead of projections for data-center energy savings. That's incredibly encouraging.

Douglas: Our server line is selling really well. We hit approximately $400 million in Sun Fire T1000/T2000 sales for the last four reported quarters. And our relationship with PG&E has led to a number of dialogues with other utilities around the country.