Biomass power plant and data centers, Google’s Finland data center site?

January 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

Found this interesting year 2000, document by National Renewable Energy Laboratory on 20 different biomass power plants most of which are forest mills.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
________________________________________________________________________
This report includes summary information on 20 biomass power plants—18 in the United States, one in Canada, and one in Finland, which represent some of the leaders in the industry. Table 1 lists the 20 plants in order of on-line date, the same order in which they are presented in the report. In some cases, the on-line date means the date an older fossil fired plant started using biomass fuel commercially (not its original on-line date). Some of the information in the table is abbreviated, but can be clarified by referring to the specific plant sections.

One of the sites studied is in Finland which reminded me of Google’s pulp and paper mill acquisition.

Google Confirms Data Center in Finland
March 4th, 2009 : Rich Miller
It’s official: Google will build a major data center at a former paper mill in Hamina, Finland, the company said today. Google bought the former Stora Enso newsprint plant for $51 million last month, and said it was “likely” to use the facility for a data center. Today Google posted details about the Hamina project on the data center section of its web site.

The site will come online in 2010.

“When fully developed, this facility will be a critical part of our infrastructure for many years to come,” Google said. “Limited testing of the facility should be underway in 2010 and the center should be fully operational later that year.”

On a humorous side, here is this post.

Biomass Power Plant Probably Hides Future Evil World Ruler

I don't know if I would like to have a biomass power plant next to my house, but if I have to get one, please let it be like this. Better yet, let me live in it.

This 49.3 megawatt biomass power plant in the United Kingdom will be fully integrated with its surroundings on the banks of the River Tees. Fully integrated as in "hey, look that cool big fat metal volcano coming out of those woods." [Heatherwick via Dezeen via Inhabitat]

A simple definition of Cloud Computing – Pay as you go SaaS

January 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

UC Berkeley RAD lab is researching data center innovations. Here is a slide from one of their presentations. Note the sponsors and members.

One of the points made on a blog post is cloud computing is their definition of cloud computing is a Software as a Service (SaaS) with “pay as you go billing.

Hence, to be more precise, in Above the Clouds, we defined Cloud Computing as follows:

Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service(SaaS), so we use that term. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. … We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization that are not made available to the public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not normally include Private Clouds.

In the same presentation, RAD lab goes on to explain “why now?”

The Economics of Pay by use have an interesting overlap with a point AWS makes.

Capacity vs. Usage Comparison

This last graph is the Christmas wish list for enlightened green IT thinkers. IT load that tracks to demand.

Oil companies funding biofuel research, Codexis is one example

December 31, 2009 Dave Ohara

WSJ.com has an article on Royal Dutch Shell and others investing in biofuel research.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC has roughly doubled its financial support for biofuels start-up Codexis Inc. in the past year, the latest sign that oil companies are slowly and selectively increasing their interest in plants-to-fuels research.

Shell is on pace to spend $60 million in 2009 to fund research at Codexis, nearly twice the amount as the year before, according to regulatory filings. Codexis filed paperwork this week for a $100 initial public offering. The start-up is developing microbes to speed up the chemical reactions that turn inedible plants, such as grasses or stalks, into ethanol and diesel.

The Energy Information Administration projects the fuel growth from 2008 to 2022.

Other oil companies are investing too in biofuels.

Other crude-oil companies also have increased spending on biofuels. Exxon Mobil Corp. said this summer it would spend $600 million over five or six years on a partnership with Synthetic Genomics Inc. to develop a way to turn algae into motor fuels. Chevron Corp. entered into a relationship in October with Mascoma Corp. to investigate plant-based fuel. And BP PLC created a venture with Verenium Corp. this year to build a fuel plant in central Florida next year.

Codexis is one example.

Recognized by the EPA

Codexis is focusing on pharmaceutical and biofuels which makes sense given their investors.

Codexis is a privately-held company, with investors including:

Bio*One Capital

Chevron Technology Ventures

CMEA Capital

FirstMark Capital

GE Energy

Maxygen, Inc.

Pfizer

Shell

Mike Manos discusses data center site selection, you need to “kick the dirt” to find what is real

December 30, 2009 Dave Ohara

At Gartner’s Data Center Conference, Mike Manos made an excellent point that “75% of the data center costs are effected by site selection.” Great architecture is designed to a site characteristics. But, the status quo is to design data centers that are built based on past experiences. Green data centers need to be designed to fit with site characteristics.

Mike wrote a post on site selection.

Kickin’ Dirt

December 21, 2009 by mmanos

I recently got an interesting note from Joel Stone, the Global Operations Chief at Global Switch. As some of you might know Joel used to run North American Operations for me at Microsoft. I guess he was digging through some old pictures and found this old photo of our initial site selection trip to Quincy, Washington.

As you can see, the open expanse of farmland behind me, ultimately became Microsoft’s showcase facilities in the Northwest. In fact you can even see some farm equipment just behind me. It got me reminiscing about that time and how exciting and horrifying that experience can be.

Kicking the Dirt.

Many people I speak to at conferences generally think that the site selection process is largely academic. Find the right intersection of a few key criteria and locate areas on a map that seem to fit those requirements. In fact, the site selection strategy that we employed took many different factors into consideration each with its own weight leading ultimately to a ‘heat map’ in which to investigate possible locations.

Even with some of the brightest minds, and substantial research being done, its interesting to me that ultimately the process breaks down into something I call ‘Kickin Dirt’. Those ivory tower exercises ultimately help you narrow down your decisions to a few locations, but the true value of the process is when you get out to the location itself and ‘kick the dirt around’. You get a feel for the infrastructure, local culture, and those hard to quantify factors that no modeling software can tell you.

Mike makes an excellent point for the decision on site selection.

Once you have gone out and kicked the dirt, its decision time. The decision you make, backed by all the data and process in the world, backed by personal experience of the locations in question, ultimately nets out to someone making a decision. My experience is that this is something that rarely works well if left up to committee. At some point someone needs the courage and conviction, and in some cases outright insanity to make the call.

Are you willing to take a risk in site selection? Most aren’t. But, the leaders are, and they are the ones who are first to go where others haven’t and have lower costs. Mike has said the cost of the land was a great deal as no one thought of the land as a data center site. Google are the others who have this down.

Carbon Neutral Google focus on methane gas reduction projects

December 20, 2009 Dave Ohara

Google had a blog post on its carbon offsets as part of their carbon neutral commitment.

Carbon offsets at Google

12/17/2009 06:38:00 PM

As leaders from around the world meet in Copenhagen to address global climate change this month, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our own carbon footprint. In 2007, we committed to become a carbon neutral company. We know that it isn't possible to write a check and eliminate the environmental impact of our operations. So what does “carbon neutrality” mean to us?

The 2nd paragraph after this introduction discusses Google’s data center work.

First, we aggressively pursue reductions in our energy consumption through energy efficiency, innovative infrastructure design and operations and on-site renewable energy. Our Google designed data centers use half the energy of typical facilities.

With Google’s resources it was interesting to see they have the same problem we all have in what are the right carbon offsets to buy?

Here at Google, we have set a very high bar to ensure that our investment makes an actual difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets that are real, verifiable, permanent and additional.

Based on Google’s research, they have a primary focus on methane gas.

To date, we have selected high quality carbon offsets from around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — ranging from landfill gas projects in Caldwell County, NC, and Steuben County, NY, to animal-waste management systems in Mexico and Brazil. Our funding helps make it possible for equipment to be installed that captures and destroys the methane gas produced as the waste decomposes. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, is a significant contributor to global warming. We chose to focus on landfill and agricultural methane reduction projects because methane's impact on warming is very well understood, it's easy to measure how much methane is captured and the capture wouldn't happen without our financing (for the projects we're investing in, they couldn't make enough money selling the gas).

One area I want to investigate further is Google'.org’s carbon offset projects.

We need fundamental changes to global energy and transportation infrastructure to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. In the meantime, the projects to which we contribute offer measurable emissions reductions and allow us to take responsibility for our carbon footprint. To that end, we're always looking for good emissions-reduction projects to support. If you have a landfill gas or agricultural methane carbon offset project you think we should consider, please visit this page for more information about how to participate in our latest carbon-offset procurement round.

The submittal page states Jan 6, 2010 is the deadline for submittals.

Request for Proposals

Carbon Offsets

In order to participate in Google's Carbon Offset procurement round, please submit the following web form by 12:00pm PST on January 6, 2010. After we receive your information, we will send a link to our standard Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Once we have your signed NDA, you will receive our Request for Proposal (RFP) document. NDA acceptance along with any questions related to the RFP are due by 12:00pm PST on January 13, 2010. All responses to the RFP are due by 12:00pm PST on February 1, 2010.