Category: Fuel Cell

iCloud, Siri

The Maiden facility is used to power cloud efforts such as iCloud and the voice command service Siri. A study published in January found that users of the iPhone 4S consume twice as much data as the iPhone 4, and three times as much as the iPhone 3GS, in part due to the large amounts of data traffic generated by Siri.

Apple said it has eliminated 30,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions through the use of facilities in California, Texas, Ireland and Germany running entirely on renewable energy. The company has been shamed in the past for its reliance on “dirty” power sources and the North Carolina facility in particular was criticised last year by Greenpeace, which said it indicated a “lack of a corporate commitment to clean energy supply” for its cloud operations. North Carolina has an electrical grid that is among the dirtiest ...

Apple has revealed new details about the operations of its huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina, including plans to build a 20-megawatt solar power facility to support its operations. Apple also plans to use a fuel cell powered by biogas that could generate up to 5 megawatts of power. The Apple facility would be the largest solar array dedicated to data center operations, surpassing a 14 megawatt array being built to support the McGraw-Hill data center in East Windsor, New Jersey. Apple disclosed its renewable energy ambitions in Maiden in the company’s latest environmental report.

A few months ago it was revealed that Apple planned to build a solar array for its massive data center in North Carolina. Now according to Apple’s latest environmental report (hat tip CNET), the company has disclosed that its solar project will actually be pretty sizable at 20 MW, and it will be built on 100 acres, and will supply the company with 42 million kWh of solar power per year. Apple calls the 20 MW solar project “the nation’s largest end user–owned, onsite solar array.” There’s other much larger solar PV projects being built in the U.S. by solar developers, which sell the solar power to utilities, like the 500 MW Blythe solar PV project, the 550 MW Topaz solar project and the 230 MW Antelope Valley solar project. But in terms of corporate user-owned solar projects, Apple’s is a big one.

Not that Google necessarily needs the acclaim, but Google has another reason today to gloat. It was just ranked as the greenest tech company by Greenpeace in its latest edition of its Cool IT Leaderboard. This time, Google "wrested control" of the top spot from Cisco, which last took the lead in December 2010's list and placed second this time around. Ericsson and Fujitsu tied for third place. IBM and HP round out the top 10 at ninth and tenth place, respectively. Key to Google's victory is transparency, at least when it comes to the environmental impact of its IT operations. Greenpeace's Gary Cook noted the following on the organization's blog: "Google is way ahead on climate solutions and energy impacts, thanks to its disclosure of its energy footprint, and for providing its impressively detailed mitigation plan for achieving emissions reductions."

But can the fuel cell firm survive as subsidies fade? Earlier this week Adobe announced that it had added another 400 kilowatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells to its current fleet of Bloom Boxes. I spoke with Mike Bangs, Adobe's Director of Global Facilities, about the installation. The two 200-kilowatt units installed at the company's San Francisco site are Bloom's next-generation design and put out twice the

How do you expand the power and cooling capacity for an 80-year-old building with historic landmark status and limited roof space, located in the middle of a noise-sensitive neighborhood in the middle of New York City? All those challenges come together at one of the most familiar addresses in the telecom industry – 60 Hudson Street. So how does a building like 60 Hudson, which has a grand history as a cornerstone in the development of America’s communications infrastructure, remain relevant as the data center world shifts to high-density server deployments? That was the question facing Peter Feldman, CEO of DataGryd, as the company occupied four floors of space in the 23-story building (see DataGryd: Major New Player at 60 Hudson Street).

Oregon-based fuel cell maker ClearEdge Power has landed a 50-megawatt, $500 million deal with Austrian utility Güssing Renewable Energy. As far as I can tell, it’s the biggest fuel cell order with a utility in the world. But the size isn’t the only factor that makes this agreement stand out. Two pieces of the deal are particularly notable. For one, the fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to produce both electricity and heat, will run off of biogas converted from wood chips and plant waste. Güssing Renewable Energy, an investor in ClearEdge, will produce the biogas. (The image to the right is a schematic of the utility’s Hofbauer reactor which will produce the biogas). Typically, ClearEdge Power’s refrigerator-sized fuel cell modules hook up to a customer’s natural gas supply and through its fuel processor draws the hydrogen molecules with oxygen. While natural gas is ...

U.S. fuel-cell maker ClearEdge Power said Tuesday it has signed a $500 million supply contract with an Austrian clean-energy firm in a relatively large deal for the fledgling industry. The privately held U.S. company makes five-kilowatt stationary fuel cells that can be powered by natural gas, or gas made from bio-materials, to generate electricity. Under the $500 million contract it signed with Gussing Renewable Energy, ClearEdge plans to deliver 50 megawatts of its fuel cells, or roughly 10,000 units, to the Gussing, Austria-based company over nine years. ClearEdge said the deal and the company's plans to gradually scale up manufacturing at its Hillsboro, Ore., factory, were made possible by $73.5 million in equity financing the company raised in August. "It's huge," ClearEdge Chief Executive Russell Ford said in an interview. "It allows us to scale up the technology in the field," and "gives us ...

ClearEdge Power lands world’s largest utility fuel cell deal By Katie Fehrenbacher Jan. 10, 2012, 5:00am PT No Comments * Tweet * * * Fuel cell maker ClearEdge Power has scored the mother of all utility deals: a 50 MW, $500 million deal with Austrian utility Güssing Renewable Energy. ClearEdge Power VP of Marketing Mike Upp tells me in an interview that Güssing will run the entire distributed network of fuel cells off of biogas, produced from the area’s forest and agricultural bi-products. To pu

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 ...

NTT America’s Technology and Infrastructure Assets Drive Global Business Growth January 3, 2012 1 Comment » NTT America, a global infrastructure services provider and wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation, today announced the company’s continued progress in keeping customers ahead of the curve and supporting customer investments during 2011. Throughout the year, company efforts focused on critical business trends including cloud computing, energy efficiency, and customers’ g

It doesn't take much of a genius to realize that the data center will become more energy efficient in the coming year and beyond. Financial incentives aside, the mere fact that nearly all enterprise systems are touting low-power operation right down to the processor level indicate that enterprises will see lower electric bills whether they plan to or not. But within the overall trend toward a greener data center, there are numerous twists and turns that could have a dramatic effect on data operations and overall productivity of the knowledge work force. One of the key questions going forward will be how to define data center efficiency. While many metrics are kicking around, there is wide discrepancy as to how best to measure usage in relation to IT productivity. The widely touted Power Usage Effectiveness metric, for example, merely measures the ratio of energy consumption by data equipment to ...

What’s up with Google and biomass power? By Katie Fehrenbacher Dec. 27, 2011, 12:46pm PT 4 Comments * Tweet * * * Out of all of Google’s close to $1 billion in clean power projects, turning biomass into energy seems like the least relevant technology to Google’s core business. But Google has made a few small investments into biofuels and biomass to energy projects including a venture investment into CoolPlanetBiofuels earlier this year, and one I learned about this week: a project that turns was

With 2011 coming to a close and 2012 just around the corner, GreenBiz asked executives from a range of companies and organizations to reflect on the past year and look at what lies ahead. They obliged by telling us about their accomplishments, goals, their thoughts about what will drive sustainability in 2012 and how they and their firms can do better in the coming year. Here's what they said when we asked: What's your biggest accomplishment in 2011? Kathrin P. Belliveau, Esq., Vice President, Corporate Responsibility and Government Affairs, Hasbro

In 2012 a fundamental change in server architecture could be on tap as companies look to cut data center costs with the help of technologies like ARM processors and graphics chips, analysts said. Low-power processors from companies like ARM could be in full use in data centers by 2013, and mixing them up with graphics chips could bring massive performance improvements and power savings, analysts said. Experiments around implementing ARM processors in servers are already underway, and graphics chips are already being used in some of the world's fastest supercomputers. Power efficiency has been among the top determining factors in server purchases as customers keep costs in mind while deploying applications, analysts said. This year, there was a spike in the build-out of cloud and high-performance servers around the hyperscale model, in which servers are densely packed to cut power consumption while scaling performance. For further power savings, companies ...