Category: Wind

Chances are the Internet has changed something about your life. How you shop. How you stay in touch with school buddies or look for a job.

But has it made you greener? And will using the Internet more change your wear and tear on the planet?

The short answer is that the Internet could save energy, if not necessarily Mother Earth.

The more interesting answer comes in a longer conversation short on absolutes and peppered with unintended consequences.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups - its service will make its debut in some neighborhoods this year - the change could be transformational.

We'll have access at home to Internet fast enough to download the city library's entire collection every minute. Speeds like that, Google hopes ...

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.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion of the how using the Internet will change your wear and tear the planet could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups the change could be transformational.

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 ...

December 21, 2011 -- Colocation provider Zayo Group announced on Monday it has completed a fiber build into the Green House Data facility, located in Wyoming. The multi-tenant Type II data center provides cloud hosting and colocation services, including managed servers, managed storage, dedicated infrastructure, disaster recovery and offsite backup.

Facebook has hired Google's former "green energy czar" Bill Weihl, in a move designed to demonstrate the company's commitment to low-carbon computing and renewable energy. Weihl will begin the new post in January 2012, Facebook confirmed. Weihl reportedly told online magazine Fresh Dialogues that he plans to "advance sustainability" at Facebook. While his job title and responsibilities at have not been decided, the focus will be on sustainability, clean energy and energy efficiency, he said. The news comes just as Greenpeace winds up a long-running campaign calling on Facebook to "unfriend coal" as a source of energy for its data centres. The environmental campaign group singled out Facebook because of the company's decision to site its first wholly-owned data centre in Oregon, using electricity from PacificCorp - an energy company which makes two thirds of its power using coal.

Bill Weihl, who was the “Green Energy Czar” at Google, will begin a similar position at Facebook next month. Weihl’s hiring comes as Facebook is deepending its commitment to use renewable energy as part of an agreement with Greenpeace. Weihl’s move was first reported by Greenmonk, and has been confirmed by Facebook. Weihl left Google in November after six years at Google, during which he championed the company’s efforts to boost its use of renewable energy in its data centers. That included Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) to add more wind power to utility grids that support Google data centers in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Pryor, Oklahoma. Google says it expects these two agreements alone to account for 15 percent of its company-wide energy usage by the end of 2012, pushing its overall renewable mix to 35 percent.

WinData is a subsidiary of Baryonyx, an energy company formed by alumni of British wind power company Eclipse Energy, which sees the operation as one which builds wind farms to generate power for its data centres. The approach is an example of a renewable energy company looking to expand into the data centre industry and WindData believes that its ability to offer long-term deals on power pricing will be a key advantage for its service. “We can offer tenants in our data center fixed-price power for the term of the lease. It removes uncertainty about price spikes in the market, and also removes uncertainty from any carbon legislation,” commented Ian Hatton, CEO of Baryonyx. The company has plans for up to five data centres at the site in Texas, the first of which will be a 123 square foot building, which will also be able to use other energy sources ...

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.

The growing focus on “green” data centers has raised the possibility that data center operators might get into the energy business by generating on-site renewable power. A new project in Texas features the opposite approach: a renewable energy company looking to get into the data center business. WindData has been formed by veterans of the wind power industry, who plan to build a data center campus near Austin, Texas that will be powered by wind farms in West Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. The project is one of the most ambitious efforts yet to make “green” power workable at data center scale. WindData is a subsidiary of Baryonyx Corp., an energy company run by veterans of Eclipse Energy, a UK firm which developed and then sold a 150 megawatt offshore wind farm. Baryonix was formed in 2009 and began making plans for a data center project in Texas. It ...

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.

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).

According to triplepundit.com's Jeff Rangel, data center power consumption stands at 1.3 percent of worldwide use, nearly three times what it was in 2000. That represents nearly 80 metric megatons of carbon emissions per year and is on pace to more than quadruple by 2020. In dollar terms, Gartner reports that the cost to cool a 25,000-square-foot data center now tops out at $4.1 million per year. Clearly, something has to give to both the economic and political pressures that high-energy consumption entails. That's probably why we're seeing such a wide range of ever-more exotic solutions to the data center's green problem.

Google just wanted to be left alone. A titan of technology, the company knew little about small towns when it arrived here six years ago. It even imagined Oregon might not notice the $1 billion server farm it built along the Columbia River. Google left its name off fences surrounding the 37-acre property, erecting a sign warning unwelcome visitors of "severe tire damage" should they cross the threshold. It even obscured its buildings from Google Maps' aerial view of the property. "They were definitely the most secret company we've ever dealt with by one-hundredfold," said Scott Hege, a Wasco County commissioner who was running the Port of The Dalles when it negotiated the land sale in 2005. "They told us at one point no one would ever know who they were."