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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.
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.
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.
#'s 1 and 2 are plain wrong, and you neglect tidal energy.
Though that is not the reason for my reply. This is:
It is not environmentalists that are holding nuclear energy back. In fact I think you'll find that Greenpeace endorses the use of nuclear energy.
What holds nuclear energy back is petrochemical profit interests and the irrational fear of nuclear energy in the average person who are typically NOT environmentalists. This fear is fostered by those who profit from the petrochemical industry.
CANDU rocks! We have the best and safest technology and the best fuel. We can sell meltdown proof reactors that run on unenriched fuels and do not produce bomb grade waste internationally, and keep the fast breeder reactors in our own hands domestically and accept bomb grade materials and waste for disposal in these fast breeders. (Though Greenpeace did get in the way of us accepting American plutonium for disposal once, objecting to its transportation north across the border, but I suspect they have back-pedaled on that by now)
You've been sucked in by the very propaganda you think you're immune to.
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 IdeasThe problem is that Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and all of their friends (namely the coal industry, ironically) put the kibosh on nuclear power when it had a chance to take over. Now, the regulations are so absurd that it cannot grow at an affordable rate in the U.S. Whatever Greenpeace blathers about now, they did a tremendous amount of damage to the nuclear power industry. So you're partly right - even after we discard your unsubstantiated refutals of the parent's #1 and #2 (there are serious efficiency issues with both solar and wind power, which is why they haven't taken over, as well as the fact that it's good for generating electricity and not as good for, say, powering a car.) I think that if you were to, say, read the news here and there, you'd see a great deal of environmental objection, both to plants themselves and to the disposal sites. It's still holding things back. Tell me where everyone agrees the waste should go. Show the number of new permits for nuclear plants. If the petroleum industry were 100% against nuclear power, then why the hell do you think they're among the leaders in trying to build new nuclear power plants? They don't care how they make their money. If you're going to rail against someone else falling for propaganda, you should try at least not to sound entirely like a shill for the contrarian viewpoint - his counterpoint on the other side.
This 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.
Yup CANDU is great. No other system is better for proliferation - that lovely easy reload without shutdown makes plutonium production so painless.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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
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
Bah!
/ nuclear
"Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."
There may be individuals in Greenpeace that don't fear the technology, but the organization's official stance is summarized above. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns