Articles from Renewable Energy World

IT companies are increasingly exploring a wide range of green power solutions in response to growing energy use at their data centers and increased scrutiny from industry watchdogs.  In part one of this article, we described utility-provided and offsite green power options available to IT companies.  In this post, we will discuss the onsi (Read Full Article)

Last month, Greenpeace launched a series of coordinated protests at Amazon, Apple and Microsoft locations to draw attention to the companies’ use of GHG intensive fuels in powering their data centers. The protests were a follow up to their recently released report, “How Clean is Your Cloud,” which criticized the companies for expanding their data centers without regard to the source of electricity. While some have questioned the report’s details, it nonetheless highlights an important issue. Major IT and cloud computing companies have been working to improve energy efficiency in their data centers, and yet mitigation of GHG impacts from power use has lagged. This matters, because recent growth of the internet and cloud-based computing is resulting in rapid proliferation of data centers and massive incremental power requirements.

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Contractors recently installed 16 polycrystalline solar panels on top of a novel computing facility on the roof of Rutgers's School of Engineering Building. Researchers will use Parasol, as it's called, to study how to effectively manage computing and data processing with solar-generated electricity. Parasol was introduced to the computer-science world at last month’s EuroSys 2012 through an award-winning poster presentation, which is on the Parasol website.

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Fishing has long been a vital industry in Iceland. It's so imprinted on the national psyche that it's hard to find anyone untouched by it among the tiny population of 320,000. Even Foreign Minister Össur Skarpherdinsson likes to say, "I consider myself to be an old fisherman." Skarpherdinsson now hopes his angling skills will come in handy as he and Iceland cast about for something decidedly different from the customary haul of smelt, herring, cod, mackerel, and other creatures. The North Atlantic island is trying to reel foreign industry on to its shores to prop up an economy still recovering from the 2008 banking collapse. For bait, it is dangling what no other country in the world can — 100 percent renewable electricity.

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In February, word leaked that Apple will install a 20 megawatt solar farm—the largest customer-sited solar array in the U.S—at its data center in Maiden, North Carolina, dubbed by some as the ‘iDataCenter’.  The project has reinvigorated the debate on the potential role of solar at data centers. Can solar make a meaningful contribution to reduce the environmental impact of energy-intensive data centers or is it simply an expensive marketing tool? Two weeks ago, James Hamilton of Amazon Web Servi

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One month after revealing plans for a big solar project at its new data farm in North Carolina, Apple has opened the kimono a bit more to show the project's planned output, ready date, and one of the key partners. Last month Apple disclosed plans to partly power its giant new data farm in Maiden, NC, with a 20 megawatt (MW) solar system. (Also part of the plan is a smaller fuel cell system, possibly supplied by Bloom Energy). Today, the San Jose Mercury News picked up on a new filing with the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC) that lays out more details about the proposed 100-acre project, including size, possible cost, and the main technology supplier.

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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 (Read Full Article)

Renewable energy executives are rolling up their sleeves for what promises to be a contentious battle this fall to gain Senate approval of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, including establishment of a mandatory national renewable energy standard (RPS). How difficult will the battle be? The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill by the slimmest of margins, with 219 votes in favor and 212 against. The House bill provides for 20 percent of the nation’s electricity supply to come from renewables by 2020, with energy efficiency improvements allowed to account for a quarter of this. Although a recent Washington-Post-ABC news poll shows fully 91 percent of survey respondents support expanded wind and solar generation, the bill reported out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (ENR) in July set the 2020 RPS at only15 percent. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL ... (Read Full Article)