Electricity Consumption at a Large IT company

Recently I had the privilege of meeting the Global Energy Director of one of the world's largest networking equipment companies and learn about the company's electricity usage and energy efficiency programs. There has been a lot of buzz about the building and data center electricity management and I wanted to get an idea of some of the numbers involved. 

• This company has direct access in California which means that they are allowed to buy electricity on the wholesale day-ahead markets. Here are some figures that I was able to gather - 
• There spend on the day-ahead market is about $25 Million / year
• By actually buying electricity in the wholesale markets, the company is paying around $0.10 cent / KW-hour as opposed to $0.14cents that PG&E would have charged them. 
• Overall spend on electricity is around 125 Million / year
• Use around 1.2 Gigawatt-hours of energy per year
• Are usually able to predict their demand within +/-5% of actual for trading in the day-ahead market. But even a 5% error is around 1.25 Million / year. 
• The energy factor is about 1.8. This is the ratio of electricity used by the servers to the total electricity used in the data-center. A number of 1.0 means all the electricity is used by the servers. Anything over that is the overhead of cooling the building and heat dissipation. Industry's best numbers are around 1.4. Obviously, each decimal point reduction has big value in terms of cost.

Note, this is just one company. So the actual market for energy efficiency is huge! No wonder companies like Enernoc, Comverge, Honeywell etc. are all going after the building efficiency market.