EDF Energy has revealed plans for a major overhaul at one of its datacentres that it hopes will dramatically improve its energy efficiency and make it "a point of reference" for other businesses trying to limit the carbon footprint of their IT infrastructure.

Speaking exclusively to BusinessGreen, Benoit Laclau managing director of Business Improvement and Technology at the company, said that it had this week given the go ahead for a major refit of one of its existing datacentres that it claims will deliver a 40 to 50 percent reduction in energy consumption.

"We have decided to focus on improving an existing site as building a new site has a major carbon footprint attached to that process," he said. "We want to show our customers what you can do in terms of energy efficiency with a brown field datacentre."

Laclau added that the company was currently looking for a partner to help with the deployment of cutting edge green datacentre technologies and techniques such as virtualisation, localised cooling and green roofing. The company aims to have the refurbishment completed and the datacentre online by mid 2008.

"As an energy company we have always been mindful of environmental issues and already have one datacentre in Plymouth where we use waste heat from the datacentre to heat the rest of the building," said Laclau. "But now we want to take it to the next level and become a real point of reference for other companies."

The new project represents one of the first steps in EDF's wider environmental strategy, unveiled earlier this month, which details how it plans to slash the intensity of CO2 emissions from its power plants by 60 percent by 2020 and cut CO2 emissions from its offices and depots by 30 percent by 2012.