The U.S. House of Representatives has cut its electricity bill by about US$2,000 a day, thanks to efforts in virtualization and server consolidation.

The project came about as part of a House initiative to cut the amount of power used by this branch of Congress by 50 percent, said Jack Nichols, the director for enterprise operations at the U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Chief Administrative Officer. He talked about the two-year effort of consolidating the House's data centers at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2010, being held this week in New York.