Yahoo! Washington Data Center and the Environment
Yahoo! is committed to being an environmentally responsible business. Yahoo is continually pushing to make existing data centers operate more efficiently and is constantly striving to reduce our energy demand.
These efforts have been recognized by the following awards
- #9 in Newsweek’s green business scorecard in fall 2010
- Greenpeace Ranked Yahoo! as having the cleanest Data Centers
- Finalist in the Facilities Innovation for Uptime Institute’s 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award
- 2009 Energy Efficiency Innovators award from Silicon Valley Power
As a leadership company with a strong commitment to corporate citizenship, Yahoo! uses ingenuity and technology to reduce our dependence on natural resources such as energy, materials, and water. And each Yahoo! employee pitches in to help reduce waste. As a result, we are increasing value to our customers and shareholders, providing an example to other companies, and contributing to a more sustainable future.
Our newest data centers are state-of-the-art, highly efficient facilities that use less power than conventional data centers, in part due to their unique technologies. Yahoo! is improving its data center designs to reach even higher levels of breakthrough efficiency. See recent articles where Yahoo! was featured: http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/energy/2009/03/24/the-internets-hidden-energy-hogs-data-servers.html and http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1124/126c.html
We replace a portion of our computer servers annually in order to ensure we are always using the most energy efficient equipment. We also improve our construction design layout and our ancillary infrastructure like chillers and generators to ensure we use energy as efficient as possible.
Together with other design features, the result is data centers that consume 40 to 50 percent less energy, elimination of water for cooling and wastewater, and the use of outside air economizers. This translates to lower utility costs and a drastically reduced impact on our environment.
Yahoo! is working with groups such as the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the Uptime Institute to share our early innovation successes at data centers so that we can help play a leadership role in addressing climate change. In 2008, Yahoo! co-sponsored a summit with the Department of Energy to create a priority roadmap for energy efficiency for the IT and Telecommunications industries.
