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?"

Comments

Look inside first....

[SubliminalVortex]

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. :)

Use DC in the data center

[davidwr]

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.

Re:Use DC in the data center

[Bios_Hakr]

A big problem is that a PC uses several voltages and most DC systems only produce 48vdc. I'm sure you could rig a busbar and a ATX power harness with some properly-sized resistors to drop the voltage to 12v, 5v, and 3.3v. However, it'd be a nasty hack.

Why don't we see more -48vdc powered PCs?

Where I work, we have commercial power and generators feeding an auto-transfer panel. The output of that feeds a rectifier which, in turn, feeds a big DC busbar with a bank of batteries attached to it. The busbar has a lead that goes to every rack in the comm center. Every rack has -48vdc powered cisco gear or an inverter to power PCs.

The AC to DC conversion is very efficient. The DC to AC conversion is very inefficient. However, the system never loses power.

Re:Use DC in the data center

[rohar]

There is a eweek article on DC power in the computer room saving 15%. On the POTS/PSTN side of the company everything is 48v DC. I think the AC data center is more due to vendor hardware availability and the expense on non-commodity power supplies. There is convergence of the PSTN and IP networks happening in the industry and maybe there will be more on the Server and POTS equipment. I think currently the systems are separate and Telco/Hosting companies maintain both the 48v DC supplies for the POTS/PSTN and the AC supplies for the IT systems.

Dupe and duped.

[DerekLyons]

This is nothing more than a slashvertisement for Rohar's crackpot 'green' energy schemes. (One of which was recently debunked on Slashdot.)

Summary

[rohar]

To sum up the comments:
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 Ideas

• CHP (Combined Heat and Power) plants
• Bio-fuel backup generators
• Wind turbine and battery systems