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DC Power Saves 15% Energy and Cost @ Data Center
Krishna Dagli writes "Engineers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and about 20 technology vendors this month will wrap up a demonstration that they said shows DC power distribution in the data center can save up to 15 percent or more on energy consumption and cost. The proof-of-concept program, set up at Sun Microsystems' Newark, Calif., facility, offered a side-by-side comparison of a traditional AC power system and a 380-volt DC distribution system, running on both Intel-based servers and Sun systems."
I, for one, would not be comfortable working around high power DC. Call me paranoid, but I rather enjoy my heart beating with its current interval. You can take all the precautions you want, but accidents do happen.
[sig]you really dont want the answers, trust me[/sig]
Telephone Companies had known this for years. This is why you can get 48vDC versions of most systems.
In a telephon e exchange 48v DC is the norm.
They have huge batteries and standy generators to keep the phone syste, running.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
> DC will kill you much quicker than AC of the same voltage/amperage.
> Then again, you don't have to worry about shorting yourself to ground with DC.
I think you had better take that electronics class again...
Good to see some more DC in use. Tesla was right about AC for many applications but DC has its merits and any useful application of DC is a credit to Edison's scientific achievements.
... those claims of saving "up to 15 percent or more".
That pretty much covers the entire range of possibilities.
I often wonder why they didn't say something like "up to 50 percent or more" or "up to 99 percent or more". Those would be every bit as meaningful.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
- But they still need to have the transformers to step down the voltage
This is done with a pulse-width modulator. An AC-DC power supply already has one of these running from 380VDC anyway. The 380VDC in that case is derived from a type of rectifier called a voltage doubler (in the case of 120V sources) or a full-wave rectifier (in the case of 240V sources). The excess voltage then comes from the fact that we are getting peak, rather than RMS, voltage from the AC to the DC side.
The savings is in that the rectifiers are all consolidated. The pulse-width modulators can have an efficiency as high as 95% easily, whereas a whole switching PS can be as bad as 50% efficient.
The savings are in the economies of scale for the rectifier. A similar savings could be realised in the pulse-width modulator, too, but would be quickly wiped out by the increase in losses by making long wire runs at low voltages (5V and 12V).
- DC requires twice as many wires
Nope. Still two to complete a circuit, just like AC.
www.wavefront-av.com
To get AC, you spin a coil in a magnetic field.
To get DC you, um, spin a coil in a magnetic field, then rectify it, then put a huge capacitor on there to flatten out the humps.
There's just no good method for generating DC. And even if there were, electric companies aren't going to run two new phases (DC+ and DC-) to get it to you from the source.
Instead, the power is going to come to near you as 3-phase, then be rectified. There is a loss in that rectification, but sadly, you can't eliminate it, just change where it happens. Moving it to the other side of your power meter will have an advantage since you theoretically wouldn't have to pay for the losses, although the electric companies would surely change their rates to recoup this lost money. But note that even if they don't change their rates, you haven't saved any energy, just not paid for as much.
So my guess is this experiment bought into this fallacy, that they measured their power usage at DC levels, found it was lower and reported that as a win, when without a source of DC power that doesn't involve rectification it really isn't.
I'm sure they save some electricity due to the increased voltage. That reduces current, which decreases power lost. This is the same reason electric companies use high voltages for power transmission.
The article seems to imply that power supplies convert 120VAC to 381VDC internally. This just isn't true. They never raise the voltage, and 120VAC peaks at 175V or something like that. Even 240V input would peak at 350V. So I don't get this. I think they just messed up a few numbers and really in the experiment connected rectified 240V (UK 240V, which is one phase double high, not the US one 120V phase over another) directly into the power supplies after the point where the rectifier would normally be.
From what I can tell, going to DC just would save you the cost of lots of little rectifiers in favor of the cost of one big one. To be honest, since the small rectifiers come in commodity ATX power supplies, you're paying almost nothing for them anyway. So I don't see that it's all that valueable to consolidate them.
I would recommend that if we wanted to save the most power on servers, we should just go to 3-phase 440V AC power supplies. A new connector would have to be designed, as the current 440V 3-phase connector would barely fit on the back of a tower, and wouldn't fit on a 1U server. This would save the most possible in losses without having to buy external rectifiers or force the electric companies to install one on site (and charge you back in increased rates).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"DC tends to cause a convulsive contraction, often forcing the victim away from the current's source."
Riight... Whichever muscle in a muscle group is stronger presents the dominant force in a convulsion. In the human arm, the gripping muscles are far stronger than the hand-opening muscles. DC or (low frequency) AC, the result is the mostly the same - the hand will grip. If that grip is responsible for the zapping, good luck. DC is worse than AC in this aspect.
That said, fibrillation is more of a risk with AC than DC, but at power distribution voltages or end-user voltages (220, or in the case of us 115), the difference in damage and risk is negligible.
The cynic in me suggests it's because your typical wall-wart costs about 50 cents to make in bulk and are commonly marked up by a factor of 20 to 100 or so, so when the company sells you a replacement they make out like Enron.
But yeah, standards exist-- most of the time, you can buy a generic PS from Radio Shack which delivers 3V, 5V, 7.5V, 9V, & 12V @ 1amp or so for much less than you can buy the product-specific wall-wart. Some vendors (like Sony) have even deliberately disregarded the JEDEC? standard connector sizes in order to prevent you from using a generic replacement PS.
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
What I could see happenning, though, is special small size switching transformers built into a standard electrical junction box, which are "smart" in some manner to know when a plug is plugged into them, which connects the switching transformer in, and that supplies, say, 12V at 10A or something to a common downconvertor system or something that all the other peripherals plug into (that, or each peripheral converts the 12VDC independently). In a way, I built something like this, once, for a desk I had: I hooked up an old Sun Computer pizza-box (Sparcstation?) powersupply and created a "bus" of electrical wires running under the desk, hooked up to screw terminal bus strips every so often. I ran the 12V, 5V, and ground lines via this bus along the length of the desk, so then I could get 12V, 7V, and 5V feeds from this system. Hooked up all my peripherals that had wall warts to the bus, and ran a "power on" green LED to the front of the desk for status. Worked pretty well.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Telecom companies have been using DC distribution systems for DECADES because they don't have to lose energy converting back and forth between AC and DC. It's about time the computer industry is catching on.