New prediction models can allow utilities to rely more heavily on wind and save millions. The utility with the most wind power capacity in the United States, Xcel Energy, is relying more on this power source and saving millions of dollars thanks to new forecasting models similar to those used to predict climate change.

The creators of Ushahidi, a crisis mapping platform, have developed hardware that keeps wireless communication going in the midst of chaos. The people behind Ushahidi, a software platform for communicating information during a crisis, have now developed what they are dubbing a “backup generator for the Internet”—a device that can connect with any network in the world, provide eight hours of wireless connectivity battery life, and can be programmed for new applications, such as remote sensing.

A lab at Harvard is developing materials with potentially revolutionary optical characteristics. The antenna, a century-old technology, is everywhere. Listening to the radio? Making a call on your cell phone? Surfing the web over Wi-Fi? The antenna made it all possible.

Google tries to use its buying clout to prod utilities to offer renewable energy option. Google has spent more than $1 billion in solar and wind energy projects but it ultimately has no control over the fuel that produces the electricity that powers its data centers. Google today is proposing a new tariff to buy renewable energy directly from utilities, a model it hopes will help scale renewable ...

Stanford researchers conceive of panel that ejects building heat into space. Stanford researchers are developing rooftop panels that cool buildings by sending heat back into space, a technique that could be more efficient than running an air conditioner from solar panels.

Storing video and other files more intelligently reduces the demand on servers in a data center. New research suggests that data centers could significantly cut their electricity usage simply by storing fewer copies of files, especially videos.

Smartphone apps that send disappearing messages are gaining in popularity. You’ve heard it an eye-rolling number of times: anything you post online, or any message you send—be it a seemingly benign text or a photo taken when you were drunk—can come back to haunt you.

Apple this week said that all of its data centers are powered by renewable energy. How Apple achieved that impressive goal reflects the complexity of transitioning to renewable energy. In its annual environmental footprint report, Apple detailed how its U.S. data centers—the computing centers that serve up Apple’s online services—can claim to be powered by “100 percent renewable energy.” 

New technology, including better control algorithms and communications, is improving the performance of wind turbines. Superficially, wind turbines haven’t changed much for decades. But they’ve gotten much smarter, and considerably bigger, and that’s helped increase the amount of electricity they can generate and lower the cost of wind power.

It might not survive legal challenges, but Aereo could force broadcasters into moving quicker to offer their shows online. Over the last few years, big broadcast networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS have only slowly started to air their regular shows and big events online. 

A 14.9 megwatt power generating station, to be owned by a U.S.-based utility, will feed local grid in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Stationary fuel cells have been steady performers for years delivering electricity at office parks, supermarkets, or wastewater treatment plants. But utilities, for the most part, have stayed clear of fuel cells.

It’s dizzying to contemplate, but it might not be long before the volume of digital data surpasses the current limit of measures. In 1991, the General Conference on Weights and Measures met to add a few prefixes to the metric system to deal with the very large and very small scales of measurement that scientific advances required. The largest they came up with is the “yotta,” a number that contains 24 zeroes. As in: the diameter of the observable universe is estimated to be 880 “yottameters.”“Big data” sometimes feels like a buzzword, but it gets more concrete when you imagine that soon the volume of digital data processed could surpass this current upper bound, which only two decades ago was the limits of scientists’ imaginations. That’s at least the prediction of Andrew McAfee, who is principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business and a ...

Apple doubles the size of the fuel cell at its new data center, a potential new energy model for the cloud computing. Apple is doubling the size its fuel cell installation at its new North Carolina data center, making it a proving ground for large-scale on-site energy at data centers.

Plexxi joins the hot software-defined networking area with control system and switches to virtualize networking and clear bottlenecks in the cloud. Deep in the recesses of the “cloud” there’s a terrible waste of human and computing energy going on, says David Husak, the CEO and founder of networking startup Plexxi.

Data Plant research project will power modular data center from biogas-run fuel cell at a wastewater treatment plant. Data center Microsoft researcher Sean Parker used to think that a sewage treatment plant would be an inhospitable place for a data center professional. Now when he smells methane at a wastewater plant, he smells free energy.

Startup lands $55 million for "microserver" design that uses low-power ARM processors normally used in cell phones. Calxeda recognized that the cell phone industry had something to teach server vendors: how to save power.

In 1903, as a last-ditch effort to maintain direct current as the standard for distributing electricity around the United States, Thomas Edison presided over a notorious event meant in part to demonstrate the danger of alternating current: the electrocution of Topsy, a circus elephant deemed a threat to humans, by a 6,600-volt AC charge. Edison's stunt was pure fear-mongering (DC being equally dangerous at high voltage), and it failed: our grid today is primarily AC. But a little over a century after Topsy's collapse, it is AC that looks increasingly wobbly. Thanks to growing power consumption by digital devices of all kinds, DC power is making a comeback, this time on its own merits. Anything that uses transistors relies on direct current, the flow of electricity in one direction. That explains why PCs, iPhones, and flat-screen TVs all have converter boxes to turn the alternating current in ...

Apple is feeling heat from Greenpeace today. The environmental group singled out the image-conscious IT leader for building data centers in regions that rely heavily on coal in its yearly report rankings of cloud computing companies. Apple gets 55 percent of its power from coal, according to Greenpeace, which is about the same as the nation’s overall energy mix, but higher than all other 14 ranked companies. More and more, West Coast tech companies are building their U.S. facilities on the east coast and around Chicago, where coal power is plentiful and cheap. Greenpeace criticized Apple because it has no data center policy that takes clean energy into account. The company got an “F” grade for infrastructure siting as its iCloud data center rises in Maiden, North Carolina, where the local utility Duke Energy relies mostly on coal and nuclear power. Apple, shot back in a statement calling ...

How much electricity does sharing a photo on Facebook take? How much carbon does it put into the atmosphere? Facebook doesn't reveal how much energy it uses. But overall, the vast computer farms that handle Internet data now use up 1.3 percent of electrical generation globally. Facebook's energy use has been growing particularly fast. It processes more than 250 million photo uploads each day, and some two million likes and comments every minute. Energy is foremost a competitive issue for Facebook. The computers, facilities, personnel, and electricity needed to keep your profile up-to-date, and available anywhere, are the company's largest single expense. That's one reason Facebook began to design and build more energy-efficient server farms from scratch. Its first data center, opened last April in Prineville, Oregon, uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as other facilities, according to the company.

Iceland's main exports are aluminum and fish. Now the isolated nation is hoping to offer the world a new commodity: a cheap, guiltless way to store its data. In February, a startup called Verne Global opened a large server farm on an old NATO base near Iceland's main airport and began offering "100% renewable" computing services to the rest of the world. It's one of three data centers in Iceland and part of what Iceland's government hopes will be a new local industry.

In 2003 Martìn Casado found himself with no small challenge on his hands: he needed to reinvent the technology that underpins the Internet. It had been developed decades earlier and was proving unsuited to an era of cyberwarfare.

Casado, then a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had been approached by a U.S. intelligence agency with a thorny problem. Computer networking technology allowed intelligence agents and other government workers worldwide to stay connected to one another at all times. Field agents could instantly share data seized in a raid with experts anywhere in the world. But the fact that so many computer networks were enmeshed also aided enemy hackers. Once they gained entry to one system, they could hop across networks to search for other treasures. The agency (Casado won't say which one) told him it wanted to keep its large network but reserve the ability to ...