The SMH has an article on NAB's new energy efficient data centre in Melbourne (interestingly the trigeneration setup used at NAB's primary data centre isn't mentioned for this new data centre) - NAB pools data to save power.

National Australia Bank will officially open a new data centre in Melbourne this week, hoping to eventually save the financial institution $22 million over decade. The bank's 23 existing data centres, ranging in size from small broom closets to large computer rooms, will be amalgamated into the new facility at Deer Park, 17 kilometres west of the Melbourne CBD, as well as an existing building across town at Knox. When completed and fully operational in seven years, the downsizing will cut NAB's power usage by 40 per cent, its chief technology officer, Denis McGee, said. ...

The average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of the bank's 20-plus data centres is 2.5. PUE measures the total energy use of a facility divided by the energy used by the ICT equipment within. McGee hopes the Deer Park facility will almost halve the bank's PUE, to less than 1.3, a coveted goal for data centre owners and users. Google claims a PUE of 1.12 across all of its data centres. ...

The scale of the new facility, and the bank's promise to meticulously manage its power usage, allowed it to negotiate near-wholesale rates directly with the electricity supplier, data centre transformation senior manager Tim Palmer said. In the case of a power outage, six diesel generators will provide a back-up source. An underground concrete tank holds enough diesel to fuel the engines for three days. Free cooling will regulate the temperatures at Deer Park for half the year, where ambient air cooler than 30 degrees will be used instead of airconditioning. ...

The bank is also embarking on a virtualisation strategy improve server usage rates from 12 to 60 per cent ... "We have about 10,000 physical and virtuals, and 55 per cent are virtualised, and we have an ongoing program to virtualise more," McGee says.

The Climate Spectator has an article on interest in trigeneration in large Sydney office buildings- Sydney's trigen power play.

The path towards distributed generation in Australia made another important step forward today with the switching on of the country’s first trigeneration precinct.

Distributed generation has become an important part of energy systems in Europe and elsewhere in recent years, but it has barely taken a toehold in Australia. However, the deal struck between the Origin Energy subsidiary Cogent and Investa Property Group, for the supply of energy to two buildings owned by Investa, may signal a change in the way energy use and network demand is managed in our CBDs.

The system switched on today is a trigeneration facility installed by Cogent in the Coca Cola Place building in North Sydney. Trigen uses gas to generate electricity on site, but then captures the excess heat for use as heating, and for cooling via an absorption chiller. Its promoters say it increases energy efficiency to around 80 per cent, compared to just 30-40 per cent in coal-fired power stations, where excess heat is usually vented.

It is not the first trigen system to be installed in Australia, but the groundbreaking nature of this facility is the “precinct” concept, meaning that Investa will be able to use the excess energy generated in one building to supply power to its Deutsche Bank building located on the other side of the harbour.

It’s a development that considerably enhances the economics of tri-gen, as some tri-gen facilities have been installed and then left idle because the buildings in which they were located could not generate the demand needed to make them efficient and to properly balance the demand on electricity and thermal energy. The precinct concept solves this by providing another electricity outlet, and could also allow the installation of larger and more efficient facilities. It is expected to be the fore-runner of numerous other such precincts in coming years.

“It is a great example of how we are paving the way for more intelligent energy systems of the future,” said Frank Calabria, the head of energy markets at Origin Energy.

The City of Sydney has bold plans to make its CBD virtually self sufficient in energy within two decades by having 360MW of such generation installed in its city building, helping avoid the costs of new generation capacity and transmission upgrades. It is negotiating on a contract with Cogent to begin installing trigen systems at various council buildings that it hopes will be able to supply energy to other council buildings, and also neighbouring offices.

Craig Roussac, the general manager of sustainability, safety and environment at Investa, said the precinct concept meant that trigen systems were now an attractive proposition, and that the company, Australia’s biggest office building owner, would be looking to retro-fit them in other buildings with the aim to create more energy precincts.

Roussac says he was not in favour of trigen systems before the precinct concept, because buildings were either forced to create artificial energy demand, switch the trigen systems off, or run them inefficiently. For him, many of these plants were only there for show.

“Responsible building operators strive to use as little energy as possible,” he said. “This agreement proves we can have our cake and eat it too. We can power a super-efficient building with lower emissions electricity, while at the same time heating and cooling it with the waste heat that would normally go up a coal-fired power station’s smoke stack. In addition, further benefits flow from the ability to export excess electricity to the grid.”

Roussac said such systems would be essential for any building aiming for a 6-star green rating. The installation costs were around “a couple of million per megawatt”, but in the case of the Coca Cola building, the return on investment was enhanced because it was leasing the plant back to Origin/Cogent and gaining a fixed income from that. “It’s like having an extra tenant. when you capitalise that income, the return on investment is quite good – it increases the value of the asset by considerably more than the cost of the plant.”

Origin's Calabria says the tri-gen plan provides 774 kWe of power to the base building and 650kWe of cooling to the air conditioning system when running at full capacity. About 50 per cent of the energy will be consumed by the base building and about half will be to the grid, for the benefit of the other building.

The SMH has an article on plans to expand the use of cogeneration in the City of Sydney - Sydney to go it alone as power producer.

SYDNEY will become the first Australian city to start weaning itself off coal-fired electricity, with the business district and much of the inner city preparing to switch to small, gas-driven power plants in the next 20 years.

The City of Sydney master plan, to be published today by the lord mayor, Clover Moore, will identify 15 ''low carbon zones'' based on trigeneration plants that create electricity and also generate heat and cold for airconditioning.

The switch could save up to $1.5 billion in state government spending on new infrastructure for bringing power from coal-fired plants, a report commissioned by the council said.

A ''decentralised'' power network for Sydney would be driven by gas, but the Herald understands plants would be capable of being driven by forms of biogas created from plant matter and sewage, as part of the council's ultimate goal of making the city centre carbon neutral by 2050.

With work on the new network expected to start within two years, the plan will increase demand for gas extraction, and possibly require new pipelines. ''NSW has sufficient known reserves of gas to meet anticipated needs,'' a spokesman said.

The plan will call for 360 megawatts of electricity from trigeneration by 2030, which would cut the city's greenhouse gas emissions by up to 26 per cent. ...

Most of the power plants would be just a few metres wide and power a city block or a cluster of buildings.

The council commissioned the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney to look at the potential benefits of the trigeneration plan.

Its report found there was potential to save $200 million in extra costs to upgrade the current electricity network before 2020, rising to savings of $1 billion by 2030. In addition, the power generated in the city would offset $500 million worth of energy the state government proposed to generate at two new coal-fired power plants.

Australian bank NAB has implemented a variant on a cogeneration system (apparently using traditional technology rather than a "Bloom Box" style fuel cell) within their main data centre in order to cut power bills and Tri-generation plant to cut bank's energy bill.

NATIONAL Australia Bank expects to save nearly $1 million in annual power costs by installing a tri-generation plant at its main data centre in Melbourne. Tri-gen plants produce electricity and use waste energy to produce heat and cooling. The resulting energy consumption is much lower than using a traditional electricity grid.

NAB embarked on the tri-gen path two years ago for sustainability purposes, as it was facing power consumption growth of 10 per cent annually.

Trigen technology introduces cooling processes into co-generation technology, which reuses heat from energy manufacture. Co-generation is the technology behind the famous New York stream system which transports heat for homes and office buildings.

The gas-powered data centre channels excess gas — heated to more than 300ºC — into the 2 megawatt trigen plant where it is sent into an absorption chiller that boils refrigerant liquid to produce cold water for cooling.

NAB data centre platform specialist, Glenn Allan, said the trigen plant was quietly switched on early this month. “We are farming a single energy expense for multiple re-use,” Allan said. “We are the first [to use trigen] in data centres, but you will be able to count the months until the next deployment.”

Allan said trigen power will gradually replace the data centres’ remaining energy grid dependence and will be considered for incorporation into all new NAB data centres. “These aren’t emergency stand-by technologies — they are running the baseload power every day of the week,” Allan said. ...

NAB’s primary Melbourne data centre has been a favourite of the banks’ carbon razor gang, as part of the carbon neutral initiative through which the bank has conducted efficiency assessments, bought a fleet of hybrid vehicles, switched to 10 per cent green power and slashed energy use in its 790 branches. ...

Power and cooling costs can also be significantly reduced by replacing ordinary servers with blades and using virtualisation, Allan said. Blade servers are the staple in NAB’s data centres and, while virtualisation has been deployed extensively, he warned that the enterprise consolidation ratios may not reach some of the more optimistic predictions. Allan said the most productive uses of virtualisation are only coming out now after the “toy factor” mentality has passed.

“There is a litany of inventions in history where the usefulness is only discovered later… virtualisation could be made more useful if I could create backup application on a server, inflate it for 90 minutes then remove it so it doesn’t take up resources,” he said.

“[Virtualisation] will lower the server-to-power ratio — NAB has 16 blades to six power supplies — and if you virtualise, the ratio becomes incredible,” he said. “The case for virtualisation is off the table; everyone should do it, if not for the power savings than for the improved change management capabilities.”

The data centre uses cold and hot isle systems and Allan, who is eagerly watching research in jet impingement chip cooling, said every data centre should operate advanced cooling management models.