The Electronics, Information Technology and Telecommunications Cluster in the Basque Country (GAIA-Cluster TEIC) has participated, together with an international consortium of companies and institutions and as the only Spanish partner, in the European project PRIME ENERGY IT since May 2010.

The project aims to promote the development of a market based on sustainable technologies and infrastructures, among which are included servers, data storage, networks and installation equipment, as well as new technologies for energy management.

The origin of the project - supported by the Intelligent Energy Program of the European Commission - arises from the need of putting into practice new technologies which will result in a reduction of the energy demand clearly need due to the increasing energy consumption of IT devices.

As a result of the PRIME ENERGY IT project - and the active collaboration of Gaia - there are a wide range of services designed and already implemented in order to promote the energy efficiency in the information technology devices. All this services, are available to be downloaded by Basque and European companies and organizations in the following web page

Among these services, the comprehensive training program addressed for the professionals in the area needs to be emphasized. The objective of the training is to facilitate the management and selection of the energy efficiency and provide them with the knowledge of the rules and procedures for improving the implementation of energy efficiency.

The program - which has been designed by the Technical University of Berlin, Polytechnic of Milan and the University of Coimbra - has been divided into seven modules available on the project webpage. GAIA- Cluster TEIC- in collaboration with the associated company PQC- has already impart this training modality in Bilbao, Madrid and Barcelona.

Additionally, a set of brochures on energy efficient technology and best practice cases in data centers in Europe have been published, as well as a brochure about the process of Green Public Procurement (GPP). For the realization of these brochure, Gaia has count with the experience and collaboration of PQC, Venticlima and Electroson Castilla companies.

In this sense, GAIA emphasizes that the implementation of efficient energy technologies and optimized hardware operations allows to achieve savings of around 75% in costs and energy consumption and bet that the public organizations "

"Lead the shift towards more sustainable production and consumption models and more ecological technologies. If we consider that every year the purchases of public institutions represent between the 16% and 18% of GDP at European scale and the 17% of GDP in Spain, the implementation of such criteria will be a significant benefit" they conclude.

Causes for the bad use of energy
According to the reports from GAIA the energy inefficiencies in organizations are due mainly to poor design and high density of the spaces, the cooling and insufficient supply, as well as for the maintenance and operations of the unqualified personal of the Data Center.

It is important to add to these problems that the majority of organizations have not implements yet a coherent strategy and a comprehensive and systematic approach to reducing energy consumption in data centers.

Therefore, they conclude, "the effective resolution of the environmental impact of IT technologies requires a holistic approach of the problem which includes 4 main areas: ecological using, eco-design, green manufacturing and environmentally friendly elimination. The main idea of the holistic approach is to close the life cycle of IT equipments in a way that does not harm the environment. "