IBM, as part of its environmental initiative dubbed "Big Green Innovations", will offer energy efficient data centres a certificate of greeness - if they can prove they have reduced power consumption.

Big Blue is partnering with Neuwing Energy to offer data centres a third-party approved certificate to show they have reduced energy consumption. These certificates can either be used to prove you are reducing your carbon footprint, or traded on the energy efficiency market. Data centres can use up to 15 times the electricity of a normal office.

Neuwing will first assess how much energy your servers and air conditioning are using, then test again when changes have been made. It will either keep a portion of your certificates or charge a per MWH saved fee.

The scheme is initially available in the US, but IBM hopes to extend it to Europe in 2008.

More on Big Blue's greening here, or there's a press release (pdf) here. ®

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