Another step towards datacentre energy efficiency could be taken next week at a European Community meeting to be held in London.

The 1 March session will be the first held by the Community to investigate the possibility of a voluntary code of conduct.

Kevin Fisher, European standards manager at Intel, said he hoped to discover the chances of “a regulatory environment without a regulator”.

Fisher is also involved with European computer makers group Ecma and benchmarking outfit Bapco in plans for second tier of the US EPA’s Energy Star http://www.energystar.gov/ programme due in 2009. The effort includes building a model whereby desktop and mobile PCs can more quickly return from idle to active states.

“We need a more holistic assessment because the real inefficiency today is the idle mode,” Fisher said. “The active mode is only about six percent [of usage] and the big block is idle mode. If you can reduce power consumption in idle mode then even if you increase power consumption in sleep mode you still have a more energy-efficient computer.”

Fisher added that he expects the EPA to have developed an Energy Star badge for servers “in the 2009 timeframe”.