APC's efficiency challenge

This week UPS vendor American Power Conversion rolled out new efficiency benchmarks for all of its products. Starting on Monday, all products now carry an efficiency rating in the tech specs that looks like this:

Buyers see a graph of predicted efficiency (y axis) based on load (x axis). Since many UPSes operate at very low load levels, efficiency levels on the low end of the load range are more important than what you see to the right.

By doing this, APC hopes to set the bar for competing products and start a trend toward providing efficiency ratings for IT equipment in general, says executive vice president and chief technology officer Neil Rasmussen. And he thinks APC has an advantage. "You'll see a factor of four reduction in power losses in power distribution units, UPSes and IT power supplies [used in servers] by 2010," he predicts.

"We’ve been working on this for a year and we are first in the industry to do this," Rasmussen said at a meeting last week. In fact, APC told me over a year ago it planned to release the specifications. What took so long, says Rasmussen, is that even APC didn't know what the efficiency numbers were for its products, nor did its component suppliers. That's a pretty sad state of affairs, given the intense focus on green computing and efficiency these days.

The effort to provide efficency specs is all fine and good as far as it goes, but I asked Rasmussen why we should trust their measurements, given that there's no standard. "It’s just like any other specification we publish. We’ll stand behind the numbers we publish," he said. Rasmussen didn't go into detail as to the methodology used.

The problem here is that efficiency numbers can be manipulated unless the specific test environment and measurement process is carefully detailed. For any kind of meaningful comparison to take place, a standard and some sort of certification process is needed to assure the public that such numbers are accurate.

Rasmussen thinks the numbers APC has come up with are good enough - at least for now. "We don’t intend to go out and certify the products in any third party way," he says, adding that it’s possible that standards will eventually emerge that every vendor be expected to test and certify to those standards.

For now, however, comparisons of such efficiency ratings, if and when other vendors issue their own variants, probably need to be taken with a grain of salt.