Of greatest concern is that as financing for cleantech gets tight, the brightest startups will struggle to find early stage capital and those companies nearing the path to commercialization will find it hard to find scaling capital.
When the VP responsible for provisioning and consolidating eBay’s data centers, Dean Nelson, went to Utah to evaluate the locale as a site for eBay’s next mega data center project, he was mostly happy. It offered tax incentives, low latency for serving eBay’s customers, and the right work force. But there was one problem. “There was a challenge around getting clean power,” says Nelson. Utah has less than 3 percent renewable energy and generates 82 percent of its power from coal, according to data from 2009 from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
If one looked back at the last sixty years and told a story about the electrical grid, it would be a tale of monumental growth as electricity use in the U.S. is about 13 times what it was in the 1950s. Americans now consume about 20 percent of all energy worldwide. But in the last decade that growth has slowed to just under one percent per year. The story of the next sixty years will be less about demand growth, but about creating a stable grid in a world of increasing amounts of renewable energy.
Google announced last week that it would use thermal storage to cool the $300 million data center it’s building on 15 hectares of land in Taiwan. The search giant has been experimental in its data center design with everything from seawater cooling to water recycling, and it’s the first time it’s tried thermal storage to cool its power hungry data centers. Thermal storage typically involves using ice or a liquid coolant that is chilled or frozen at night when power is less expensive, and then deployed in a heat exchange system during the day to cool servers. From the perspective of Google, it’s able to draw and store the energy it needs overnight in a thermal form.
The ongoing imperative to lower power consumption in the data center drove another key acquisition last week. AMD, a company that has fought a decades-long losing war with Intel over building the best CPU, acquired low-power server maker SeaMicro in a move that says a lot about how low power is the new black and how the relationships and market dynamics between chip makers and server OEMs is transforming. While the focus on low-power servers often centers on low-power chips, that wasn’t what AMD liked about SeaMicro. AMD wanted everything that connects to the CPU, and SeaMicro’s technology centers on the fabric that links together hundreds of low-power CPU cores, simultaneously reducing the number of components on the board while it turns off those cores not in use to reduce power consumption. SeaMicro has spent $50 million developing the technology.