OREANDA-NEWS. CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) today announced that it has joined the U.S. Energy Department's Better Buildings Challenge, a leadership initiative aiming to create energy efficiency solutions and accelerate investments for companies, organizations and local government. CenturyLink's goal is to reduce non-IT load energy consumption in its U.S. data centers by 25 percent by 2023.

A cornerstone of the President's Climate Action Plan, the Better Buildings Challenge seeks to double American energy productivity by 2030 by encouraging corporate and public sector leaders across the country to save energy through commitments and investments. CenturyLink, a leading provider of hybrid IT solutions across colocation, managed hosting, cloud, network and IT services, is committed to environmental sustainability and operational excellence in its data centers.

"This initiative aligns with CenturyLink's ongoing efforts to continually improve energy efficiency across our entire data center portfolio," said David Meredith, senior vice president, global data centers, CenturyLink. "We're fully committed to running highly efficient, well-managed data centers that meet and exceed a myriad of industry standards."

CenturyLink has also achieved operational excellence with several related data center initiatives, including:

  • Opening a central Washington data center that is supplied, in part, by hydroelectric generators powered by the nearby Columbia River.
  • Becoming the first global data center provider to deploy Bloom fuel cell technology in a multi-tenant data center (in Irvine, Calif.). The Bloom Energy Servers, which generate electricity through a clean electrochemical process using air and natural gas, delivers enhanced sustainability benefits, including high efficiency, small physical footprint and reduced water use.
  • Winning a coveted Energy Efficiency Improver's award in April from DatacenterDynamics for reducing power consumption by more than 30 percent at CenturyLink's Columbus, Ohio, data center.
  • Pursuing Energy Star certifications for 20 U.S. data centers, including a recently certified Boston facility that ranks in the top 1 percent of all data centers in the U.S. for energy efficiency.
  • Being the first company to pursue Uptime Institute's M&O Stamp of Approval at the global portfolio level.

"Thanks to a dedicated drive to actively create and share the best energy efficiency solutions, Better Buildings partners have dramatically cut their energy waste and saved more than a billion dollars since the Better Buildings initiative was launched five years ago," said U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. "As the initiative continues to grow, we are moving the nation forward by reducing energy costs and carbon emissions through energy efficiency."

Working with the Energy Department, CenturyLink will share successful strategies that maximize efficiency over the next decade. Since the Better Buildings Challenge launched in 2011, program partners have saved $1.3 billion and 160 trillion BTUs of energy.