Google's renewable energy investment pays off, finds 18,890 MW of Geothermal Power

October 7, 2010 Dave Ohara

GigaOm reports on Google's striking geothermal gold.

Google Strikes Geothermal Gold in West Virginia

By Jeff St. John Oct. 5, 2010, 4:27pm PDT 1 Comment

Has Google struck geothermal gold in West Virginia? A new report shows that heat underground the state could provide 18,890 megawatts of power using today’s geothermal technology — more than the state’s entire power generation capacity of 16,350 megawatts, most of which comes from coal. Google, which has beeninvesting in next-generation clean powertechnologies, funded the research.

Geothermal makes sense for a data center.

Geothermal, unlike other renewable energy resources, can be easily used for 24/7 baseload power — that is, it doesn’t sag and surge with the sun and the wind, which is a problem with solar panels and wind turbines. Geothermal projects are on the rise, although venture capital and private equity investors haven’t yet shown much interest in the capital-intensive sector. Companies tackling geothermal power range from the startup Vancouver-based Magma Energy, which went public last year, to geothermal giants like Ormat Technologies.

Google also has an internal solar technology project, as well as an energy-trading subsidiary, Google Energy, which bought 114 MW of wind energy via a wind farm in Iowa owned by NextEra Energy Resources. Google is likely shopping for more clean power to provide its data centers’ vast energy needs and help it with its pledge to go carbon-neutral — could geothermal help with that?

Here are more technical details.

6. Conclusions

This reconnaissance investigation of the thermal regime of the eastern U.S. has defined a significant thermal anomaly along the Appalachian Mountain trend in West Virginia and demonstrated that temperatures high enough for electrical power generation occur at depths greater than 4 to 5 km in large areas of eastern West Virginia. This finding opens the possibility of geothermal energy production near the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard. Further research is needed to refine estimates of the magnitude and distribution of West Virginia’s geothermal resource and to understand the cause of the high heat flow values. The presence of a large, baseload, carbon neutral, and sustainable energy resource in West Virginia could make an important contribution to enhancing the U.S. energy security and for decreasing CO₂emissions.

If Brazil can build a critic proof dam, why can't the same ideas be applied to a data center?

October 7, 2010 Dave Ohara

Dams are notorious for their environmental impact. James Cameron has protested one Brazilian dam.

Brazil dam project prompts animated response from director Cameron

September 01, 2010|By Matthew Knight for CNN

Movie director, James Cameron has teamed up with environmental campaigners in an effort to help Brazilian tribes' epic fight against the construction of a controversial dam in northern Brazil.

But, another Brazilian dam has a strategy to be free of critics or at least minimize the social and environmental impact. WSJ reports on this effort.

Brazil Engineers a Critic-Proof Dam

By JOHN LYONS

Ana Ottoni

The Santo Antonio dam rises in the Amazon, one of 24 planned there.

PORTO VELHO, Brazil—Tethered to scaffolding on concrete towers by a clay-colored river, workers clad head to toe for protection from sun and mosquitoes are building the first large dam in the Amazon in decades.

Greenpeace has focused its sights on Facebook's data center. The Brazilian company has spent $600 million to reduce the impact of the dam.

Yet few people have heard of the $8 billion Santo Antonio project, even in Brazil—which is just how the builders planned it. They designed it to avoid the controversies that have delayed other dam projects for years and multiplied their costs.

The builders spent some $600 million to head off trouble with regulators, environmental groups and Indian tribes before it arose. They trained thousands of rain-forest residents to provide a local labor pool and built modern houses for families who will be displaced. They created a high-tech fish ladder so species like giant catfish can get around the dam—and to meet one local demand, they built an alligator slaughterhouse.

For those who doubt a green fits in a data center. Consider these words.

The dam's greener hue isn't because of any special environmental ardor on the part of the builders. It reflects a calculation about the unpredictable extra costs that environmental suits, Indian protests and political backlashes can cause.

Note the dam staff member who comes from World Wildlife Fund.

"In the end, this is business," said Gabriel Azevedo, a former World Bank and World Wildlife Fund executive who serves as sustainability director at the energy division of the dam's lead construction company, Odebrecht SA. Odebrecht is a closely held Brazilian concern whose other projects include boring a 12-mile tunnel through the Andes to carry Amazon water to Peru. Its co-builder is another private Brazilian company, Andrade Gutierrez SA.

Is this the future of data centers? Well maybe not all of you. As Greenpeace stays focused on Facebook as the target, others sigh in relief.

What is the latest way to Green the Data Center?

October 6, 2010 Dave Ohara

I just got back from Data Center World in Las Vegas, and a couple of question I was asked were.

Seen anything good at the show?

Do you see anything as big changes in the data center industry?

After a long night out on Tuesday night with some amazingly smart data center people it hit me what is changing the data center industry. People. There are more people who are thinking holistically of the role data centers play in IT. The past ways of building data centers are many times wasteful, inflexible and expensive.

There are now people who have software backgrounds who are working on data centers. There are process engineers who are working on data centers. The role of data center designer building to align with the companies business is part of a business strategy. Twitter is the latest to announce they are going to a custom data center.

Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to more quickly make adjustments as our infrastructure needs change.

Finally, Twitter's custom data center is built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure. This first Twitter managed data center is being designed with a multi-homed network solution for greater reliability and capacity. We will continue to work with NTT America to operate our current footprint, and plan to bring additional Twitter managed data centers online over the next 24 months.

The rapid growth of the data center construction driven by companies who are hiring expertise into their company to build efficient, flexible and cost effective data centers to align with business objectives is where companies are gaining competitive advantages.

A common problem in colocation data centers is the end user’s perception that a cold data center is a good data center. It is people’s beliefs that drive misperceptions on what a data center should be. The innovative people are breaking the myths created by the analyst community and marketing departments on what a data center should be.

One of the main reason I went to Data Center World in LV was actually to go to a private party at PURE nightclub.

I will name no one who was there, but for those who were there you know who was, and I wanted to document the event as how it is significant to drive change in the industry. Many of the people there I have blogged about as they are some of the most innovative thinkers. People are driving the greening of data centers not technology.

We had four cabanas outside with a great view of the city.

I met the organizer of the event for the first time in Dec 2009 when interestingly enough I went to PURE for his private party. The first one was fun with about a dozen. Yesterday’s party had about 3 dozen. He was able to get an amazing attendee list.

At the last minute we got a confirmation someone was flying in at 9p and he could make the party, as many of his ex-coworkers and present coworkers were there. His last minute acceptance I shared with another visionary who I met at the show who had his “500 MW of power” data center team with him and he changed his travel plans to attend the party as he realized when else could he connect with some of the other people there. Plus he’s partied at PURE and knew how much fun it would be.

We had a few more people who were able to bring some forward thinking end users and land owners as well, so it wasn’t just data center designers.

Writing this blog post at 10p on Weds night, it is kind of surreal that just 24 hours ago, I was in LV with some of most amazing data center people.

The tagline “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” may describe a typical late night party. But, I think what happened last night at the PURE nightclub was a connecting of people who have a passion for the industry rarely seen, and their ideas will leave Vegas.

People are going to drive the greening of data centers and changes in the industry. Not a vendor’s technology. Not, new standards or an analyst report.

Dec 2010 is Gartner Data Center World and many of the same people will be back in Vegas. We’ll see if the party master can pull off another event, but he is going to have a tough time topping last night.

Greening the Data Center moves to Network Gear

October 6, 2010 Dave Ohara

ZDNet covers a new silicon standard for network gear to use less energy and be greener in the data center.

Green moves to the datacenter network silicon level

By David Chernicoff | October 5, 2010, 9:27am PDT

Summary

Low-level energy savings across your corporate networks becomes a hardware possibility with the newly ratified IEEE standard.

With the ratification of the IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard the energy savings mantra of the green movement dives deep into the underlying infrastructure of your datacenter networks. The new standard is intended to allow energy savings at the network silicon level by reducing power demand when there are periods of reduced link utilization.

Broadcom announced the Silicon to support the 802.3az standard.

Broadcom Corporation today announced that it has the industry's broadest portfolio of available silicon solutions supporting the newly ratified IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard.
This extensive portfolio includes switch silicon that spans entry level unmanaged to enterprise and metro class switches; single, quad and octal Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) physical layer devices (PHYs); dual and quad 10GbE PHYs; 10/100 and 1GbE controllers, and 10GbE converged network interface controllers (C-NICs).

Broadcom EEE-compliant products offer energy savings of up to 70 percent or greater and provide customers with end-to-end silicon and software solutions that enable faster deployment of energy efficient networks.

HP integrates new servers with POD containers for faster, cheaper, smaller IT solutions

October 5, 2010 Dave Ohara

HP announced new servers for solution providers.

Accelerate application performance and efficiency for service providers

When supporting a business model based on large-scale application service delivery, service providers need to consider every CPU, millisecond, watt, dollar and square foot to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

The new HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable System features a common modular architecture that can scale from one node to thousands while delivering breakthrough energy efficiency and performance of up to 1 teraFLOPS per unit of rack space. This standard platform can be highly customized and tuned with the HP ProLiant SL390s G7 server and HP ProLiant SL170s G6 server to meet varying application demands, such as high-performance computing, web services, cloud computing and hosting.

As part of HP's Converged Infrastructure.

HP is targeting the solution provider market with this current announcement.

HP POD-Works and HP PODs are ideal for any service provider / enterprise customer requiring:

Quick IT deployment using HP POD-Works and HP Factory Express

Pay as you grow to minimize up front capital outlay - add additional HP PODs as you need more datacenter space

Decrease operating expenses with PUEs as low as 1.25

HP POD meets demanding requirements for service providers

High efficient power distribution delivering 3-phase power through the HP POD, 240V within racks, and supporting N+N power redundancy

Easily accommodates very dense IT deployments supplying up to 600kW in a 40ft/12m HP POD, and 290kW in a 20ft/6m HP POD