Ed Whitfield: “I thank Representative Eshoo of California, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, for her work on this bill.…”

“I thank Representative Eshoo of California, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, for her work on this bill. This legislation would require Federal agencies to coordinate with the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop an implementation strategy, including best practices and measurement and verification techniques for the maintenance, purchase, and use of energy-efficient and energy- saving information technologies. OMB would be required to track and report on each agency's progress. In 2013, the U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough electricity to power all of the households in New York City twice over; and, I might say, they are on track to reach 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020. This amounts to roughly 2 percent of all the electricity used in the U.S. each year. Federal data centers are responsible for at least 10 percent of all U.S. data center energy use. Consequently, this bill seeks to improve the energy efficiency of Federal data centers by, in part, requiring the Department of Energy to update a 2007 report on data center energy efficiency and maintain a data center energy practitioner certification program. DOE also would establish an open data initiative to help share best practices and support further innovation and develop a metric that measures data center energy efficiency.…”