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Renewable Energy for the Data Center?
rohar asks: "The ISP/Carrier/Colo company I work for has just announced a new 'green' program. Although this is a step forward, they don't have a comprehensive environmental sustainability plan. I have been leading an open renewable energy project and I think we have 2 novel ideas for scalable and reliable renewable electrical power, the Solar Ammonia Absorption Convection Tower and the Compressed Air Wind Electrical Generation System. Do you have new ideas (Solar PV has been done, for example) for renewable power generation and conservation for the data center and other areas of industry?"
Just a side note... Sometimes the companies need to look internally in order to put things into perspective. For example, how often does one go to the 'printer' to only find abandoned print-outs that someone, who really cared to have that information printed needed? I've seen reams of paper wasted on not only forgotten revisions of documents, but also those who print out travel directions, local restaurant coupons, etc. If you're going to save energy, keep others from wasting it. :)
I've wondered why most A/C units for buildings seem to rely on radiating heat via waste air. There must be a decent use for that heat nearby (at least in densely populated areas). Find a pool that needs heating, or help run the hot water tanks, or create a public hot shower or something!
Water is a much better conductor of heat than air anyway.
"I've wondered why most A/C units for buildings seem to rely on radiating heat via waste air"
Because plumbing is expensive, and is another failure point.
How much energy is lost by having AC-DC converters for battery backup only to convert it back to AC then back to DC in the server?
Put a single pair of load-sensitive, redundant power supplies on each rack and run DC to every device. One of these should have battery backup.
Yes, there will be a lot more wires but it will be a lot more efficient and have lower air-conditioning costs.
Speaking of air conditioning, if you can channel the heat to something useful, that's a plus.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This application is a bad match for renewables unless you're in an area with really steady winds.
Conservation might be the better tack. DC power distribution? Watch out for voltage drops though. Virtualization? Fewer but larger hard disks? There will be tradeoffs but there should be real room for improvement at the design stage.
Please don't abuse the term "open", it's the 21st century version of the "e-" prefix.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is simple physics!
1) Wind does not create enough potential kinetic energy to serve as a useful coal/petrol replacement.
2) Current solar conversion systems do not have anywhere near the efficiency to serve as a useful coal/petrol replacement.
3) Even if we get "green" on energy usage the requirements of running civilization will continue to escalate rapidly.
We need to concentrate on reality here! Yes we need to cut down pollution to stop greenhouse warming but pretending warm fuzzy solutions will work is just a waste of time. The environmentalists need to just suck up their guts and admit it's time for nuclear as we don't have any other working solutions on the drawing board.
So if your datacenter is like a lot of datacenters, you probably have a bunch of servers. Servers tend to try and be redundant. i.e two mirrored hard drives, two power supplies, second machine to fail over to. What if, instead, you hosted on virtual machines & cut down on the number of hot-failover components, and machines. You could have a smaller number of servers functioning as failovers, and you could replace parts as needed without their using up additional power....
just a thought.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
How about:
- Grow plants (or algae) that have a high energy content and do not need good land. E.g. algae can be grown in salt water, switchgrass grows well in a variety of circumstances that other crops don't like, and kudzu grows whether you want it or not.
- Use the energy captured in these plants to generate electricity. There are various options here, too: extract oil from algae and combust that, convert the sugars in the plant matter to ethanol and burn that, or perhaps burn the plants whole.
I don't know which combinations of growing, harvesting, extraction, conversion, and combustion are most efficient. However, there is definitely a lot of variation here. Studies that have been done that prove some combinations aren't worth it (you have to put in more energy than you get out), and others are (you can actually supply the US with enough energy, without running out of space to grow crops for food).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen.html
or this:
http://users.erols.com/mshaver/bikegen.htm
This is nothing more than a slashvertisement for Rohar's crackpot 'green' energy schemes. (One of which was recently debunked on Slashdot.)
After reading the other replies, the solution "seems" obvious. Of course, that means it probably won't work.
Offer rack-servers with power supplies that use -48V DC input. For the more common form-factors, e.g. ATX and a few others, these should be produced in enough volume to be "commodities" and priced accordingly, at least in as much as any non-consumer component can be considered a commodity.
The parts cost to produce 100,000 power supplies that run on -48V DC has got to be less than making the same 100,000 PSes running on 220/110 AC.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Conservation Ideas
- D.C. rather than A.C. power mains
- Waste heat recovery for structures or cottage industries
- Power saving features in server hardware
- Server Virtualization
- Better High Availability/Redundancy resource management
Generation IdeasThis is a classic slashvertisement - a longwinded summary cut right from TFA, then a silly open question at the end "Would you like to know more?"
Let this guy DIAF, with Roland, and Eugenia, Dvorak, and the rest of the zeros.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What I meant was that any rack-mount server, or any PC re-purposed as a server and used in a server farm, could have its PS replaced by one that used 48V input.
For ATX-sized PSes and other common form-factors, there should be enough demand to make these as a commodity and perhaps even as a vendor-supplied option.
For proprietary form factors you won't have the efficiencies of mass production but they should still be an option.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Been listening to Al Gore again I see. Well, get your tree hug'n merit badge in one easy step:
1) Buy "Zero CO2" or "Renewable Power" for your servers.
Many utilities have some form of "zero CO2" power that you can purchase as an option. You use 100KWHr? Then pay a price and they'll buy 100KWHr from a windfarm. Not coal, not gas, not oil; wind. You don't get to use it but somebody does. Balances you out. Gets your Karma back.
Often adds about 2 cents per KWHr. (In Idaho and Oregon I think it's less).
I suggest keeping a "green" server farm simple by outsourcing your "green".
Where I live, (Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley,) I buy solar and wind power directly from the grid. It's not the cheapest electricity, but it is affordable. PG&E, a major electric company in CA, has very low carbon output per kilowatt hour. They also allow you to sponsor reforestation, thus allowing you to recapture the carbon generated from running your servers.
It is also possible to buy carbon credits. This is where you essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the air. At the consumer level, Terrapass allows consumers to purchase carbon credits.
No, I will not work for your startup
http://flickr.com/photos/brien/391452489/
If you can get a reputable publication to publish such a thing, including vendor names and budget analyses, I'll be happy to read it. Otherwise, stop wasting our time.
The idea that nuclear is the cure for all evils, including bad breath and ugly sheep is somethine we were supposed to have outgrown in the 1950s when people realized that "meterless power" based on nuclear energy was a pipe dream.
Tech Public Policy stuff