We start the New Year with a story that combines energy usage and recycling - and it’s grim reading. If your supercomputer falls behind in the power-efficiency race, you will find it difficult to dispose of, even if you are giving it away. New Mexico’s plan to raise money and boost the State’s profile with a supercomputer-for-rent was ambitious. Even in 2008, when it launched its Intel-based Encanto machine, sites including The Register were sceptical. How could it cover a cost which would grow to $20 million, by renting out its capacity, when other supercomputers would quickly overhaul its performance?

This is my third year here, and there’s been no trouble finding something to say each week. This year, as the Greenwash sluiced down the plug-hole, there’s been more actual News about green data centers - and this year, energy was a key factor. Let’s take a look - in the only British news roundup of 2012 that won’t mention Royal Jubilees, babies or the London Olympics.

Predictions aren’t always accurate. The Mayans could tell us that...if their civilisation hadn’t collapsed in the 9th century due to entirely unforeseen circumstances The Mayan calendar supposedly predicted the end of the world in our year 2012. This didn’t happen of course. Other predictions, like global warming, are also not “accurate” in terms of specifying times and places. We know that weather patterns will change as the global temperature goes up, but climate scientists don’t yet predict specific events such as Superstorm Sandy.

As Doug Mohney told us last week, US energy policy has shifted away from over-hopeful notions of green energy, towards a grimly practical notion of getting shale gas and shale oil into production, to cut costs and bring manufacturing back to US soil. In Britain there are similarities, and in both nations data centers, which make up a small but useful percentage of the economy of both nations, are heavily dependent on these energy policy decisions.

There’s plenty of energy news this week from governments and giant corporation - but the story that most interested me was from a little school in Wales. This week’s energy news includes the possibility of a green tax from Washington, a budget statement in the UK in which our green tax clings to life, all of which affects the cost of power. There have also been huge orders for solar and fuel cells by Apple, which could help build the market that will re-shape the energy used by data centers.

This week, Google patented a low-cost, modular, way to manage hot aisle containment in data centers. And hasn’t said another word about it. David O’Hara’s Green (Low Carbon) Data Center Blog spotted it, and I saw a link here on Green Data Center News. At that stage, the pictures weren’t available, so it was a bit tricky to see what it was all about. 

The Green Grid is pretty pleased that its PUE (power usage effectiveness) measure is on the way to becoming a formal standard. But what difference will that make in practice? PUE is a simple ratio, one number divided by another. It might seem odd that it will take the UN-sanctioned standards body ISO a couple of years to turn this into an official standard, but the data center industry has already seen how far people can bend that ratio to get the answers that they want.

New ways to measure data center efficiency are getting more attention in a couple of European events. It begins to seem as if there may be a new way to figure out how green your servers are. But what is the biggest question? Are people asking how good these new metrics are?