Germany trades Nuclear for Coal, renewable energy is not a viable alternative

Salon has an article on Germany's increase in Coal power production from 43% to 52% with the retirement of Nuclear Power.

Germany’s clean energy plan backfired

The nation's move away from nuclear power drove it right back to coal

Environmental groups like Greenpeace can make all the noise they want, but the state of renewable energy and its costs are not there yet.

Said a campaigner for Greenpeace, “The Merkel government doesn’t do enough to protect the climate anymore.”

Besides Germany.  Spain tried to push Renewable Energy and met an unsustainable cost with sustainable energy.

Mr Miralda is the victim of a bungled, overambitious renewables programme. Governments everywhere want to turn green and create environmentally friendly jobs. But as Spain shows, good intentions are not enough. If the policies are wrong, the benefits are wasted, the jobs disappear, the costs remain—and business investors bear the brunt.

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But costs exploded, too. Subsidies to solar energy rose from €190m in 2007 to €3.5 billion in 2012 (an 18-fold increase). Total subsidies to all renewables reached €8.1 billion in 2012, see chart. Since the government was unwilling to pass the full costs on to consumers, the cumulative tariff deficit (the cost of the system minus revenues from consumers) reached €26 billion, having risen by about €5 billion a year.

Expectations are high for renewable energy, and there are plenty of politicians who pushed for renewable energy projects and subsidies.  But, given Germany and Spain's results it looks like wind and solar renewable didn't work this time around.

If you are anti-nuclear, then you may cheer France's EDF withdrawing from Nuclear projects in the US.  But the withdrawal is driven by cheap US natural gas not renewables.

PARIS—French power group Electricité de France SA EDF.FR +7.39% said Tuesday it has signed a deal with U.S. partner Exelon Corp., EXC -0.73% marking the start of the French firm's gradual withdrawal from its multibillion-dollar foray into U.S. nuclear power and illustrating the shale-gas boom's continued wide impact on energy companies' strategies.

Cheap, plentiful U.S. natural gas extracted from shale rock formations is undercutting nuclear power as a form of energy for generating electricity. As a result, building and operating new nuclear power plants now looks even riskier and less attractive, damping enthusiasm for a resurgence in the sector and prompting EDF—the world's largest nuclear power operator—to prepare a strategy to exit its U.S. operations.

The Facebook DCIM whale that got away, Facebook builds its own DCIM solution

Some use the term Whale Hunting to describe going for the big sale, and I would expect that some had used this term going for a DCIM sale at Facebook.

If you don't like the Whale analogy.  Another one is the biggest wins are many times like the "belle of the ball" where companies are the most attractive for a sale.  

Whatever analogy you use the Whale or Belle these companies are smart and know what the market looks like and is used to turning away advances and not taking the bait on a hook.

Then Facebook sends this message out discussing DCIM at DCD SF.

The management tools used today are already a hodgepodge of DIY and third-party solutions. The DCIM solution Furlong hopes will emerge from the current effort will establish a line of communication between management tools on the server side and management tools on the data center side.

Facebook is stuck. With as important as DCIM is, it is not a high enough priority to dedicate the resources to solve.

At the same time, using software-engineer hours to build a solution from the ground up does not make business sense. “Our software developers are better utilized worrying about our infrastructure and worrying about product than they are worrying about data center space.”

You don't hear glowing reviews of DCIM SW from the Whales or Belles in the industry.  Does this mean DCIM is only good enough for the smaller less attractive companies?

Digital Realty has chosen to build its own DCIM which is part of why they'll discuss their solution.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR), a leading global provider of data center solutions, announced today that it launched EnVisionSM, a comprehensive data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution.  EnVision provides increased visibility into data center operations, including the ability to analyze data in a manner that is digestible and actionable; a user interface with displays and reports that are tailored to data center operators; and access to historical data as well as predictive capabilities.

"Up until now, data has been collected, but it has not necessarily been easily accessed or arranged in an intuitive manner that is helpful to a data center operator," said David Schirmacher, senior vice president of portfolio operations at Digital Realty. "The goal in rolling out EnVision across our global portfolio is to give our customers a common database that is structured around the specific needs of data center operators and can therefore manage the millions of data points that are found in today's large-scale facilities."

DataCenterDynamics discusses this is not a threat.

DCIM vendors should not see this trend among hyper-scale operators as a threat, however, Ascierto says. Yes, their physical footprint does represent a sizable chunk of the addressable market, but the market is so immature, and the market penetration rate of DCIM is so low, there are plenty of other operators to go after, she says.

Not getting the big win may not be a threat, but it never feels good to miss the big sale that could be bragged about as the Whale or Belle of the Ball.

CloudPhysics uses a modeling, simulation, data approach to Operate Virtualized Infrastructure

GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on CloudPhysics.

Exclusive: CloudPhysics seeks to nip VMware deployment issues in the bud

by Barb Darrow

1 HOUR AGO

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SUMMARY:

CloudPhysics says its Knowledge Base Advisor about VMware deployments is just first step in it becoming the New Relic of VMware operations.

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“We continuously analyze your operational data and relate it to a massive index of knowledge base articles and other unstructured data we manage.  We call this a ‘relevance matching engine’ for finding the exact vendor issue alerts personalized for specific components and configurations in your environment,” he said.

CloudPhysics has focused on managing VMs, but many of the ideas are ones to consider in the Physical data center.  This page is one I liked.

 It will be interesting to see how CloudPhysics develops as they identify more areas of inefficiencies.

We think datacenters of today are woefully inefficient, both in terms of machine and human cost. Often, issues are discover when it is too late, requiring emergency fire drills to resolve. We understand these issues, and the dynamic nature of your virtualized environment. You demand deeper visibility into your datacenter, and we provide that by tapping into what we call ‘collective intelligence.’

Canary in a Data Center, maybe a time to break down the security, IT, and facility barriers

Fast Company has a post on the Canary intelligent home security system.  But, my first thought is this would be great in a data center, colocation, or server closet.  The biggest problem would be it threatens the silos of security, facilities, and IT operations teams in their specialized systems.

I know one of you out there will take the leap and order one of these for your server area.

BTW, I have a home video recording system and it is so much better than a typical security system approach.

The hardware has these features.

The software has these features.

Finally College costs may drop as supply of freshman drops

For all the complaints about college costs rising which seems like no one can do anything about.  I find it rare that anyone looks at the problem as a supply and demand problem.  Demand from parents and students has been rising for college education.  Colleges see an inelastic price curve. They raise prices and still have full enrollment.  If the supply of students drop and colleges are competing for a limited supply of students, then prices should drop.

WSJ has an article on a student drought hitting smaller universities.

Student Drought Hits Smaller Universities

At Loyola, Freshman Class Size Plunges

As Loyola University New Orleans gears up for fall classes next month, the 101-year-old Jesuit University faces a crisis: There will be 25% fewer freshmen than the school had banked on.

"It was a pretty big hit," said Marc K. Manganaro, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

Getting a targeted number of accepted students to commit to a college's freshman class—known as the "yield"—has become more crucial for thousands of schools.

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Enrollment rates for numerous smaller and lesser-known colleges and universities are falling this year, due to a decline in the U.S. college-age population, years of rising tuition, increasing popularity of Internet courses and a weak job market for recent graduates.

There is data to show the student enrollment is declining.

After decades of growth, college enrollment nationally dropped 2.3% this spring, compared with spring 2012, according to a report released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The decline is poised to continue. The number of U.S. high-school graduates peaked at 3.4 million in 2010-2011 and is projected to fall to 3.2 million by 2013-14, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The dip in graduates has been particularly pronounced in the Midwest and South.

I have 7 more years before my first goes to college, and I am disappointed by the possibility of college costs retreating.