Category: Solar

Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Created by developer Craig Harrison, the Niobrara Data Center Energy Park is a proposal for a company or even the government to build one or more data centers on a one-square mile plot of land in Colorado’s Weld County.

Harrison says the site is unique in that a natural gas power plant could be built on it (a gas hub is a few miles away), and has a sunny climate that would enable an onsite solar panel farm. These local clean energy sources could be connected in a microgrid that could add uptime security for a data center, as well as reduce efficiency losses from transmission.

Maybe alternating current (AC) generators have been used more because they are of simpler construction than direct current (DC) generators, but whatever the rationale may be DC is making a comeback. In data centers, at least.

Servers, landline telephone systems, several electric motors, batteries, ships and airplanes all run on DC. Facebook (News - Alert) adopted DC architecture for its Prineville, Ore. data center, ABB bought a controlling interest in Validus DC systems, which specializes in DC data center equipment, and General Electric bought Lineage Power, producer of DC equipment.

While nearly every device is getting smaller and more efficient, information is getting much bigger and unwieldy. Billions of bits of data are streaming in from everywhere: buildings, vehicles, manufacturers, warehouses, government agencies, credit card transactions, traffic signals, the electric grid, and just about anything else that is connected -- wired or wirelessly -- to something else. This "internet of things," as it's been dubbed, already consists of a trillion connected devices, and it's growing exponentially.

According to Wikipedia, a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. Virtualization and software design have been the main drivers in the development of disruptive innovations in hardware.

Utilities worry about a lot of things, such as keeping the lights on, earning a return for investors, and making regulators and customers happy with their service. Now there is a new worry: How can they protect customers from what one utility refers to as “mental fatigue?” In this particular case, the utility raises the issue as it pr

The full story can be found here. 33: ABB to Supply DC Power Distribution System to Green Data Center ABB announced that it will design and install an advanced, dc power distribution system for green.ch, one of the top information and ...

Happy New Year to you all. If we had to have a new year’s resolution in the world of green energy and green data centers, I guess it would be to maintain some clarity over the difference between efficient energy use, and renewable energy supply. We all know that we must do something about climate change (at least, all of us except the most ignorant climate-change deniers). What that should be depends on whether you think that we can cut our energy use by changing our habits and being more efficient, or keep our lifestyles just the same and change the way we generate our electricity. Ideas like smart grids and low-energy data centers play towards the path of greater efficiency, while moves to use wind and solar power are heading towards changing our energy sources. Both are green - but if your argument jumps relies on both, or flips ...

December 19, 2011 -- Cloud hosting provider and data center operator Green House Data reported on the weekend that it had increased the number of renewable energy credits purchased during 2011 boy more than 100 percent compared to what it bought in 2010.

Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation. In a hangarlike building where General Electric once assembled steam turbines, a $100 million battery manufacturing facility is being constructed to make products using a chemistry never before commercialized on such a large scale. The sodium–metal halide batteries it will produce have been tested and optimized over the last few years by a team of materials scientists and engineers at GE's sprawling research center just a few miles away. Now some of the same researchers are responsible for reproducing those results in a production facility large enough to hold three and a half football fields.

It’s looking a lot like a white-knuckle Christmas for renewable energy companies.

Solar power has been only capable of producing a small part of data centre energy needs, but this may change, says Peter Judge Solar power has always seemed a good long term bet for renewable energy. After all, pretty much every single Joule of energy we use on the planet comes from the sun originally The sun’s energy is caught by plants, which make fuels, either through the long process of fossilisation producing oil and gas, or by directly producing wood, or man-made ethanol to burn. Animals’ energy comes from plants, and the sun drives the water cycle which produces hydro-electric energy. Nuclear power uses energy stored from older suns where the heavier elements are made. Geothermal energy does include energy originating on earth – it is the heat of the earth’s core, but it is maintained at that temperature by radioactive decay inside the earth.

On October 29, a freak early-season snowstorm hit eastern New York and western and parts of central New England, blanketing some areas in as much as two feet of highly unusual pre-Halloween snow.

November 28, 2011 -- The Indian data center market will reach $1.3 billion in 2016 with help from telecommunication providers and hosting providers expanding their infrastructure in the country, a recent study by research firm Gartner claims.

I know that politicians are required to have an odd view of th world: what else would provide the ego necessary to think that they and they alone have the answers to life's problems? But when politics meets the green (or even Green) understanding of economics we do end up with some really rather strange results: Households currently pay £89 a year on their bills for the green energy drive, but this will increase every year to reach £280 by 2020, according to the Government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

IBM has said its new solar array is the first to be designed especially for powering IT systems IBM has created a solar array system designed with the data centre in mind, arguing organisations could use it to reduce the carbon footprint of their existing IT infrastructure or power sites in areas without a reliable electricity supply. The company claims the 6,000 square foot array in Bangalore, India can power 50 kilowatts of computer equipment for 330 days per year, running five hours per day. The rooftop array currently supplies nearly 20 percent of the power requirements of IBM’s India Software Lab – which consumes around 25 to 30 teraflops of compute power.