Jeff St. John 12 01 09, 9:00 AM

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Bluestone Energy and AdaptivCool Link Up in New England

Bluestone Energy Services, which designs and implements energy efficiency projects for commercial and industrial buildings, has a new data center partnership in New England.

The Norwell, Mass.-based company said Tuesday that it has an exclusive arrangement with data center cooling startup AdaptivCool for all projects in the territories of utilities NStar and National Grid.

AdaptivCool makes systems that pinpoint "hot spots" in data center aisles and racks, and floor tile fans that direct cold air to those hot spots. That can help data centers cut their cooling bills by 30 percent or so – not bad, considering that cooling can use up to half the energy for some data centers (see AdaptivCool: The Goldilocks of Data Center Cooling).

Bluestone has been moving more aggressively into the data center efficiency business, said Adam Fairbanks, vice president of engineering and business development. That's because data centers are starting to face serious concerns about having enough electricity to expand or keep running (see Data Centers Could Hit 'Resource Crisis').

One project Bluestone and AdaptivCool did at a Cambridge, Mass. data center cut cooling power by about 40 percent, he said. Beyond the about $86,000 a year in projected power bill savings, the project garnered a $54,000 grant from NStar – one of many utilities giving rebates to data centers that cut their power needs through a variety of means, from better cooling to more efficient IT (see PG&E OKs Rebates For Data Storage, Sees Thermal Energy Storage Next).

Lining up the most lucrative sets of utility rebates is one of the services that companies like Bluestone, Lime Energy, and a host of big energy services companies (ESCOs) such as Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Lockheed Martin, Siemens, Schneider Electric and Chevron Energy Services help clients with (see The ABC's of Energy Efficiency, Postal Style and A PPA Model for Building Energy Efficiency?).