The curious link between the smart grid and green data centers - by Doug Mohney

Entities Mentioned

• Europe
• IBM
• Google
• Doug Mohney

1. 

   Smart grids are the new black, with pundits and vendors talking about monitoring – and ultimately controlling – everything from the power plant down to the home utility meter.   Picking up all that data and processing is, however, turning into a job for the (I assume) green data center.   

   Take the examples of Google, IBM, and Verizon. Google's embrace of smart grids is fairly obviously.  It is a Silicon Valley company, so worrying about the environment goes with the business cards.  It has lots of spare compute power that it would be more than happy to turn into a revenue stream, so plugging in a monitoring service to summarize is pretty straightforward. 

   PowerMeter is Google's play into the smart grid arena and a fairly lightweight one. The service is a free simple home energy monitoring tool for households – you have to buy and install your own smart "monitor" at your house.  Users can look at their total household consumption and get it compared to an average, but there's no deep monitoring involved.  Utilities get sanitized data in aggregate for their monitoring purposes; if you're running a greenhouse for ganja on the side, The Man won't be able to pluck you out by excessive wattage for all those high-intensity lights.

   On the other end of the scale, IBM has embraced the smart grid as one of its key strategic initiatives and has a whole ecosystem of solutions to cover the two-way flow of energy "from powerplant to plug" as the company's website states.  IBM's prepared to deal with everything from optimizing delivery of electricity to talking to the latest smart appliances and asking them to take a break during peak usage times.

   Utilities working with IBM are heart-attack serious about a fully intelligent network to monitor existing systems that deliver power, manage demand, and integrate renewal energy sources into the mix. Partners span the globe with representatives in Australia, Brazil, Europe and India. 

   IBM's data center play within the smart grid is multi-fold, including consulting services on network design, applications to tie everything together, and green data centers and servers to manage and direct all those smart sensors and appliances as they are deployed over the next decade.

   And then there's Verizon with a middle-of-the-road path.  The company has partnered with the CURRENT Group, pairing CURRENT's intelligent sensors and analytic software with Verizon's IT, security, network and communications and consulting services to deliver a grid monitoring solution for everything but the "last mile" of power delivery.

   Utilities get a focused solution to improve grid efficiency in order to satisfy the mantra of reduced cost, reduced carbon emissions and reduced system demand.   Needless to say, data collected by CURRENT's sensors need to feed into a data center – just the thing that Verizon happens to offer.  Ultimately, Verizon could offer a SaaS (Software as a Service) or a cloud-based model to quickly get utilities up and running. 

   Verizon's special sauce for the smart grid is wireless technology.  Today, 3G cellular technology can be used to link sensors together while down the road, 4G cellular technology is expected to extend grid monitoring – and potentially control – down to individual households and appliances.  In five years, a new washer or refrigerator could come straight from the factory with an embedded LTE device capable of reporting energy usage back to a utility.

   No matter what approach is taken, smart grids are only going to generate more demand for green data center computing in the future.

   
   

   
   

   Related Articles

   • Demo versus Retro by Doug Mohney
   • also mentions Doug Mohney
   • Iceland's Woes Won't Stop Data Center Plans
   • also mentions Europe
   • Religare's green data center
   • also mentions IBM
   • Beyond Going Virtual by carol wilson
   • also published in Views and Opinions on Green IT

   • Virtues of Virtual by Carol Wilson
   • also published in Views and Opinions on Green IT
   • Intel Finds Significant Savings By Using Free Cooling
   • also mentions Google
   • Iceland: Calm, Cool, Collected by Tate Cantrell
   • also published in Views and Opinions on Green IT

Login to comment.