15 Sep 2008
Carbon Trust Investments and Catapult Venture Managers have each invested £1m in UK-based cooling company 4energy.
4energy specialises in advanced cooling technologies for infrastructure-heavy telecoms firms. It uses passive cooling techniques rather than the conventional vapour compression refrigeration used in most air conditioning units.
The investors feel that the increased focus on reducing IT energy use and rapidly expanding telecommunications infrastructures in India, China, Russia and Brazil mean there is a healthy market opportunity for the company to expand.
Jonathan Bryers, investment partner at Carbon Trust Investment Partners, said: “With air conditioning a significant and rising cost to businesses around the world and companies facing increasing pressure to reduce emissions, we believe we will see increasing demand for 4energy’s technology in the years ahead. It has many attractions to businesses given the low capital costs and low-cost retrofit capability.”
4energy claims its cooling systems can reduce the energy used to regulate the temperature of critical industrial electronic equipment by up to 90 per cent.
And the investment will help the firm adapt its technology for company datacentres, which is a huge market.
Pete Le Noury, investment director at Catapult Venture Managers, said: “We originally backed this management team as an early-stage investment and have been impressed with the way they have developed, trialled and installed their cooling technology with a number of significant infrastructure companies – clearly demonstrating large energy and CO2 savings."
They have been installed by companies such as Vodafone, EDF Energy and Scottish Power Energy Networks.
Simon Mendham, energy manager at Vodafone UK, said: “We have worked with 4energy for the past two years and it has delivered practical alternatives to our current cabin cooling solution. This will be one of many initiatives that will help us to meet our 50 per cent CO2 reduction targets over the next 12 years.”
LATEST STORIES ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
LATEST JOBS
TODAY'S TOP STORIES
HIGHLIGHT
The Labour leader has said little on the topic of climate change or green growth since securing the post
INSIGHT
NEWSLETTER
INSIGHT
This new handbook explores practices that allow organisations to overcome their technological limitations and traditional office-culture challenges - freeing employees to do more with less from wherever they want to.
The centralised printers used in many businesses are wasteful, unreliable and expensive to run - just as their suppliers intend
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Add your comment
Time to act
It really is time for businesses and public sector organisations to play their part in reducing energy use in this country. We all know that IT, and data centres in particular, are major users of power. The average energy bill to run a corporate data centre in the UK was recently reported to be about £5.3m per year ? and this is predicted to double to £11m over five years. As a provider of data centre services, I believe the IT industry has a major role to play in reducing carbon emissions across the globe and initiatives such as this deserve support. It?s also a question of good business sense - Gartner predicts that by the end of 2008 50 percent of current data centres will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demand of high-density equipment. Furthermore, it believes that energy bills, which have traditionally accounted for less than 10 percent of an overall IT budget, will soon account for more than half given the rising cost of energy. If 4energy's claims that its cooling systems can reduce the energy used to regulate the temperature of critical industrial electronic equipment by up to 90 per cent are true, then this is welcome news indeed. Peter Knight CEO Adapt PLC
Posted by Peter Knight CEO Adapt PLC, 19 Sep 2008