I had a chance to watch HP's video and asked if they could post the video on Youtube to share more broadly.
This video is the marketing testimonial format. It is 4:20 min long.
Growth of Biomass energy plants is a new source for a Green/Low Carbon Data Center,
NPR has an article on the growth of Biomass energy generation.
Wood-Powered 'Biomass' Plants Have Critics Barking
by MARTIN KASTE
Listen to the Story
Billions of dollars in tax credits for alternative energy were included in the federal stimulus package. Some of the money is going to encourage Americans to do something man has done for centuries: burn wood.
Plans for electricity-generating "biomass" plants are in the works around the country — and they're under attack from critics who worry that burning more wood may not be as environmentally friendly as other kinds of alternative energy.
I've had multiple conversations with OSIsoft's Pat Kennedy on the opportunity for data centers to locate near pulp and paper mills which have an abundance of biomass, energy, water, and steam to support data centers.
But, data center site selectors and their customers are risk averse going with safe places. Google bought a decommissioned pulp and paper mill, and I blogged about biomass power generation here. I know of an existing pulp mill with 20 megawatts of current renewable biomass power with plenty of steam and space for a data center, but the owner has had a difficult time getting data center developers, engineering and customers interested in his site given there are no other data centers located in the area.
I am constantly amazed at how much money is wasted on data centers. The number of executives who want to reach out and touch their data center put data centers close to their corporate offices like the bay area. You don't see Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook building data centers in the bay area.
If you want to have a competitive advantage in data center services go where the power is cheap and sustainable.
Keep in mind when you have a $100 million plus budget, the data center con game is on and you can get played. Mike Manos describes some of this.
Its an industry dominated by boutique firms in specialized niches all in support of the building out of these large technically complex facilities. For the initiated its a world full of religious arguments like battery versus rotary, air-side economization versus water-side economization, raised floor versus no raised floor. To the uninitiated its an industry categorized by mysterious wizards of calculus and fluid dynamics and magical electrical energies. Its an illusion the wizards of the collective cottage industries are well paid and incented to keep up. They ply their trade in ensuring that each facility’s creation is a one-off event, and likewise, so is the next one. Its a world of competing General Contractors, architecture firms, competing electrical and mechanical firms, of specialists in all sizes, shapes and colors. Ultimately – in my mind there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Everyone has the right to earn a buck no matter how inefficient the process.
I wonder if it is worthwhile to give tips on the signs of when you are being thrown a lot of BS.
One of the top tips I would make is don't let your corporate real estate who provides your office space be responsible for data centers. Data Centers are not office spaces, the people who you want to build your data center most likely are not the people who built your office space.
Due to the money spent on data centers, almost no one says "yeh, I made a bunch of mistakes building mine, and I could have saved a bunch of money if I had made some different decisions. Let me tell you what I would have done differently." Because, if he did, he would mostly be fired for admitting he made million dollar mistakes.
This is why people glowingly promote their data centers as being LEED certified and top efficiency, because it directly reflects on how smart they are. Beware of those who are promoting their data centers, and don't tell you the mistakes made.
No One Builds Perfect Data Centers.
Read my post again on top 9 data center mistakes.
Not Calculating PUE ROI, 1 of 9 Top Data Center Mistakes
Lee Technologies sent over their Top 9 data center mistakes paper, and I liked it right from the start as they made the point people don't calculate an ROI for PUE performance. PUE is closest to telling an efficiency of a data center which to a layman is the closest we have for data centers for a MPG, but who specifies a high MPG number and doesn't think about how much it costs for the extra MPG above the norm.
Washington and Oregon Wind Farms biggest market is California, water is connected to wind
Seattletimes has an article about Wind Farm growth in Washington State.
As wind power booms, so do the challenges
The revolution happening along the Columbia River is full of promise. But wind power is fickle, and keeping our energy system running smoothly has become "the great economic and engineering challenge of our time."
By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
A wind project towers over Highway 14 in southeastern Washington near the Columbia River. It's one in a cluster of wind farms at the epicenter of the boom. The projects have been an economic boost for the local communities, creating hundreds of jobs and generating lease fees to landowners.
Related
- Wind-power projects in the Pacific Northwest (PDF)
- Opinion | Time for Washington state to move beyond coal
- Grays Harbor PUD won't move forward with wind farm
CENTERVILLE, Klickitat County — Along the ridge-top flanks of the Columbia River, hundreds upon hundreds of wind turbines rise from wheat fields and sagebrush.
On a blustery spring day, these turbines can crank out more than twice the power of the Northwest's sole nuclear power plant. Then, on hot days in the summer, when the winds go still, the output plunges.
The turbines represent perhaps the most dramatic change to the regional power-supply system since the construction of the Bonneville Dam launched the era of federal power.
PREV
Here is graphic of Washington and Oregon Wind farms.
Before all of you Pacific Northwesterners get excited about all the renewable energy. All this power brings energy management challenges.
But the fickle, roller-coaster nature of generating electricity from the wind is also placing large new strains on efforts to manage the regional power grid.
"It is the great economic and engineering challenge of our time, at least in this industry, to try to figure out how to make all this stuff work," said Steve Wright, administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). "It's a thrilling ride. But if something goes wrong, we're the folks that people are going to look at. So we take this very seriously."
The BPA manages a regional power grid that, minute-by-minute, must match the flow of electricity surging through the system with power consumption. When wind power unexpectedly surges or drops below forecasts, the BPA must idle back or crank up hydroelectric production from a network of Columbia River dams in order to avoid blackouts or other power disruptions.
As the wind industry expands, the BPA has found it more difficult to even out all the surges and drop-offs in electrical power, and still meet other responsibilities that include spilling water to aid the passage of endangered salmon.
50% of the Washington BPA power goes to California.
But nearly half the region's wind power is shipped to California, and that proportion is expected to grow in the years ahead, according to BPA. The power lines that head south already are close to capacity, creating questions about who will pay for new lines and where they might go.
And Oregon's shipping power to Southern California.
On the Oregon side of the Columbia, the largest wind farm in the world — a $2 billion project with 330 turbines — is scheduled to begin operations in 2012. The farm will sell all that power to Southern Edison, a California utility.
When I first looked at the wind farm PDF I was wondering why the wind farms were all so close to the Columbia river which probably has to do with complex relationships with water mass, temperature differentials, elevation changes, etc. But, another point is the wind farms need the hydro power.
Small gaps between forecasts and wind-power production are relatively easy for BPA dispatchers to handle; they can quickly increase or decrease the amount of hydro power produced by Columbia River dams. BPA then charges the wind operators for this service, which also is necessary to avoid power surges that, in a worst-case scenario, could cause blackouts.
Natural gas is another way to address peaking power needs.
Wind-power developers say there are other, less-costly options for balancing out the power surges without tapping into the BPA hydro system. They could, for example, pay companies that operate gas turbines to crank up capacity when wind dies off, and also pay to have those gas turbines backed off when the wind is blowing.
Or wind power may generate hydro power.
Klickitat Public Utility District proposes to harness surplus electricity to pump water from a low reservoir along the river to a second one high in the hills. When the operators want to tap into that power, they could run the water downhill through a hydro turbine system.
It's an expensive plan, with a price tag estimated at $2 billion.
If this sounds a bit complicated it is, and all of this is most likely going to increase power prices.
At some point data centers are going to start hearing about data centers with microgrids. It has got to be cheaper to ship bits than electricity across state lines.
Mike Manos presents Data Centers are CO2, Yahoo and Koomey supporting the issue
DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Uptime presentation by Mike Manos on Data Centers CO2 impact.
Manos: Industry Must Prepare for ‘CO2K’
May 19th, 2010 : Rich Miller
Mike Manos of Nokia speaks Tuesday at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2010 in New York.
In calling the data center industry to prepare for carbon regulation, Mike Manos invoked the Y2K crisis of the late 1990s, warning that “CO2K” threatens to be similarly disruptive.
It's great to see Mike Manos use his speaking spot to discuss carbon impact.
Jonathan Koomey supports the same issues.
The impact of a “carbon tax” was also highlighted by data center energy expert Jonathan Koomey, who said the issue is “not on the radar screen” of corporations.
‘A Price for Carbon’
“There will be a price for carbon,” Koomey said in his Monday keynote at Uptime. “We have to start thinking about how that price affects the economics of data centers. Carbon taxes will have an impact on where you locate your data centers.”Koomey used the framework of the UK’s recently enacted Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) to illustrate the potential impact. At the CRC rate of $19 per ton of carbon emissions, a 130,000 square foot data center with coal-sourced utility power might pay an additional $5 million a year.
“That’s real money,” said Koomey. “If you have a data center in a place that’s all coal, that’s the business risk you’re taking on.”
And Yahoo's Christina Paige chime in too.
Manos’ assessment of the role of data centers was echoed by other speakers at the Uptime event. Yahoo initially bought offsets to address its carbon output, according to Christina Page, the company’s director of Climate and Energy Strategy. But the company soon shifted its focus to improving the energy efficiency of its data centers.
75 Percent of Carbon Footprint
“We quickly realized that 75 percent of our carbon footprint was from data centers,” said Page. “The best opportunities for leadership were in that area as well.”
Facebook is currently catching flack for its coal powered data center in Prineville, OR. Currently the count is up to 442,000 members on English, Spanish, and French facebook pages asking for 100% renewable energy for Facebook.
Start measuring your carbon impact and think about how you can lower your carbon impact.
Breaking the rules for Data Center Site Selection, HP discusses Farm Waste as energy supply
One of the smart people I get to have regular conversations with is Pat Kennedy, Founder and CEO of OSIsoft. Pat is the one who got me thinking about green data centers when he asked a simple question three years ago, "how do you measure the power consumption of an application in a data center?" This got me started down a whole path of monitoring and modeling.
One of the latest topics Pat and I have discussed is MicroGrids. Google thinks about this too. See this Google video, I can see some of the Google data center team in the audience.
HP is making news today with their paper on a microgrid for data centers powered by cow manure.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we design a supply-side infrastructure for data centers that runs primarily on energy from digested farm waste. Although the information technology and livestock industries may seem completely disjoint, they have complementary characteristics that we exploit for mutual benefit. In particular, the farm waste fuels a combined heat and power system. The data center consumes the power, and its waste heat feeds back into the combined system. We propose a resource management system to manage the resource flows and effluents, and evaluate the direct and indirect economic benefits. As an example, we explain how a hypothetical farm of 10,000 dairy cows could fulfill the power requirements of a 1MW data center.
Pat Kennedy long ago was making the point that data centers could be a lot efficient if sites were chosen to be next to power generation, biomass, and/or other large consumer of power. But, this idea is controversial in that a standard practice for data center risk reduction to place data centers far away from hazardous materials. I think a large methane store would typically get classified as a risk to a data center. So, if you are totally risk averse and don't pay for the power bill, why not skip over the site with methane. Most would.
Plus there are risks that HP doesn't mention in their brief statement on financial and associated risks.
Financial cost and associated risks are perhaps the most
important consideration. Existing farms that have invested in
supply-side infrastructure often do so only if a power-purchase
agreement can be signed. Otherwise, the return could be too
speculative to justify the capital investment. A data center has substantial, continuous, and long-term power needs. Thus the data center owner could sign the power purchase agreement and provide the assured return desired by the farmer.
You are now dependent on a Farm. What is the #1 risk to your manure production? Water!!! When there is a drought there is an impact to agriculture production and cattle need a lot of water. This article says it takes 2,000 gallons of water to make a gallon of milk.
It can take up to 2,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk. The cow needs water to perform basic biological functions from day to day, and only a fraction of the water the cow consumes is actually converted into milk. The fact that it takes so much water to produce cow's milk means that anytime you or any consumer chooses to drink milk, the burden you place on the natural environment is a thousand times greater than if you were to consume water itself. Drinking one gallon of milk is like pouring 1,999 gallons of fresh water down the drain.
Actually putting a data center in operation using a Farm has these risks like water and methane gas. There are a bunch of other issues that can be addressed like water.
Mike Manos and I regularly discuss that water is the next scarce resource for data centers. Be careful not thinking about the secondary and tertiary affects of a change in the water supply.
I congratulate the guys at HP for creating more awareness that a microgrid data center strategy has merit.