Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Intel Testing Solar Power For Data Centers

Posted by kdawson on from the something-green-in-the-desert dept.

miller60 writes "Intel has installed solar panels at a New Mexico facility to test the potential for using photovoltaic solar power in data centers. Solar has proven impractical in data centers thus far for reasons of cost (too high) and capacity (too low). Intel will test the 10-KW solar array with data center containers and as supplemental power for summer capacity challenges, and says the project is a first step toward solar data centers. The project is housed at the New Mexico site of Intel's recent research in air side economizers in data center cooling."

19 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. I'd think solar HVAC would come before PV. by Rei · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's a much simpler task. You use solar heat to drive an absorption or adsorption cycle rather than a compressor. Datacenters need lots of cooling, after all.

    --
    Tonight's Special: Leg of Salmon
    1. Re:I'd think solar HVAC would come before PV. by Rei · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just thought I'd add: here's an example solar air conditioner. Some are even reversible and can become heat pumps in the wintertime.

      --
      Tonight's Special: Leg of Salmon
    2. Re:I'd think solar HVAC would come before PV. by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Informative

      Except that the summary specifically says that the new research is being done at the same place they recently tested thier non-AC cooling solutions, so this particular datacenter needs almost no cooling.

  2. Photovoltaics aren't yet up to breakeven... by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... but solar thermal -> heat engine has, if the size is reasonably large.

    Wind turbines ditto if large enough and the site has good winds. (For house-sized they're only past cost breakeven if you can save a few grand by not running grid power to a new rural site.)

    Progress in photovoltaic design and energy storage systems may bring both solar and small wind past the competitive-with-grid crossover, perhaps in the next few years. Rises in grid power costs could do it, too.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    1. Re:Photovoltaics aren't yet up to breakeven... by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Insightful

      By the way: "Breakeven" in this context is "costs no more than installing and buying grid power" - appropriately amortized over the life of the installation.

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    2. Re:Photovoltaics aren't yet up to breakeven... by Vellmont · · Score: 2, Insightful


      By the way: "Breakeven" in this context is "costs no more than installing and buying grid power"

      Depends on where you are. Many areas of the country have much higher electric costs, and a lot of sun. With tax credits available, it often times is a good investment.

      --
      AccountKiller
  3. Solar is starting to become promising by ducomputergeek · · Score: 5, Informative

    We're not a datacenter, just a development company. We had money left over last year that was either going to be taxed and some tax credits expired in december. So we needed to be reinvested into the business some how. We put in solar panels on the office roof that meets about 60 - 70% of our power needs. This has lowered our power bills by over half. That's freed up enough cash flow to pay for another developer. We viewed the investment as a sunk cost that freed up enough to hire an additional Jr. programmer that we were really needing.

    --
    "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    1. Re:Solar is starting to become promising by StreetStealth · · Score: 3, Interesting

      People throw the word "green economy" around without really thinking about it, but you just gave the most succinctly excellent example of it I've ever read. What a great move.

      --
      Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
    2. Re:Solar is starting to become promising by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's not green economy, it's just economics coupled with things they don't teach you at business school. (I hold degrees in German and International Business). What holds most people up is that the rate of return and ROI calculations aren't quite that good from an accounting stand point. It still takes about 7-12 years to pay for itself ceteris paribus. That is if you just calculate the cost savings off the utilities. Then you can add some future present value if you were to invest the money in the analysis if you want to get complicated. But in this market, where do you want to invest? Now it maybe true that for, say an average home owner, solar has not come down to the point where it can be declared feasible. But there are some other intangibles that are hard to put a number to down on paper. i.e., if we use the extra cash flow and spend it on marketing, or another developer, etc., what are the potential payoffs?

      What we do know is that utility prices are unlikely to go down and the new developer is already paying dividends. We have a new product release ready to ship at the end of the month. Without him, it would have been March or April. If all goes well, then the cost of the solar panels could be recovered in as little as 18 months and we're getting started on the next phase of the project 2 months ahead of schedule and we can do so with little or no change in exiting net cash flow.

      I wish I could say they taught me this at college, which taking 4 semesters of Econ did help, but I learned about sunk costs and how to factor risk into ROI considerations from our family farms when I took a year off from work before I started graduate school to learn how to run them with my Dad. (We rent the farms, but take an active role in managing the business side of things like selling on the futures market, etc..) An example was putting up grain storage bins. It was taking over 3 weeks to harvest the rice when we had to take it to the dryer, they could manage to unload 2, maybe 3 truck loads a day. That's 3 weeks where $500k worth of crops were sitting out in the field. All it takes is a hail storm or high winds, and you can cut that number by 30% or more. (It happened this year, Hurricane Ike knocked the yields down by about 30 - 40 bushels per acre, and at $5.50 a bushel it adds up). For $50k we could put up storage on the farm. It now takes 3 days (or 2 long days) to harvest all the farms. So a ready crop is now sitting out in the field a very short period of time. How long is it going to take to recoup the ROI there? Well if you look at the raw numbers, about 15 years. But if you get your crop in once before a hurricane Ike comes around, suddenly they've just paid for themselves. Now granted, my Dad is a retired executive that spent his entire career on the finance side of things at a large company. So I've grown up around looking at things...differently than my peers.

      On the farms, we hedge. In a sense, that is what we are doing here. We are hedging that utility prices in our area will continue to rise over the next 15 - 20 years. But more over, we think we an invest the savings into other projects that will in turn pay off more than the cost of the solar panels. So it made sense in our case.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
  4. Core 2 Duo Thermal is the answer by htnmmo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Solar energy would be good but that's not the only clean energy solution.

    You ever stood behind a rack of servers? Those things put out a lot of heat. If we can tap geothermal energy from deep underground, we should be able to grab it from a server room and convert it to energy.

    Using that heat energy for electricity will also reduce the amount of cooling power needed.

    I plan to finalize that solution after I put the finishing touches on my perpetual motion machine.

    1. Re:Core 2 Duo Thermal is the answer by Chabo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One of my friends told me that Cray built a facility in Minnesota. When they moved out, they failed to sell the building cause it wasn't heated. When they had their supercomputers running there, a separate heating system just wasn't necessary!

      --
      Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
    2. Re:Core 2 Duo Thermal is the answer by DerekLyons · · Score: 2, Informative

      You ever stood behind a rack of servers? Those things put out a lot of heat. If we can tap geothermal energy from deep underground, we should be able to grab it from a server room and convert it to energy.

      Why 'should' we be able to? You think the laws of physics work like they do in Star Trek where all you have to is wish hard enough?
       
      Not to mention that what we are grabbing from deep underground is steam to drive turbines, not heat directly.

    3. Re:Core 2 Duo Thermal is the answer by CheeseTroll · · Score: 2, Funny

      when I peek into a pipe leading from a geothermal well I get scalded by steam

      Caution: Do not look into geothermal pipe with remaining face.

      --
      A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
  5. Who would have thought it? by zappepcs · · Score: 3, Funny

    I would never think that Intel would leave data center power research to Sun? You'd think they would do their own research?

    --
    Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
  6. Been there, done that by MrSteve007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://geekpi.com/?p=142

    I designed, installed and maintain a 10kw solar array last year to power our businesses servers and offer a large (2900 amp hour) uninterpretable power supply during prolonged grid outages.

    We recapture the waste heat during the winter to heat our facility at night. During the summer we vent that heat directly to the outside, and only use the AC as auxiliary cooling. It works excellently.

    http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=sb_success.sb_successstories2008_johnsonbraund

    1. Re:Been there, done that by Torfbolt · · Score: 5, Funny

      ... uninterpretable power supply ...

      Yeah, those things sure are hard to understand sometimes...

  7. Re:Earth's rotation instead by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Funny

    I proposed that; but you wouldn't believe the whining I had to put up with. An entire bloody hemisphere: "But Mr. fuzzyfuzzyfungus, we don't want to be plunged into eternal darkness and subfreezing temperatures..."

    Spoiled, the whole lot of them. Why, in my day, we had to chip away the ice with our teeth, provide light for our crops by burning our children, and by god we liked it!

  8. Do the math, folks by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The numbers on this are super dismal. To power a 300W server, you need about 5 square meters of solar collector. About $12,000 of panels to offset 2 cents an hour of power. Plus you need tons of storage batteries or substitute power for night and cloudy days. Yuck. A sensible company would only do this for PR or due to some government mandate or tax credit. Certainly not to save money or save energy.

    1. Re:Do the math, folks by BikeHelmet · · Score: 2

      Your math is off a bit. You don't need 5 square meters to generate 300 watts; maybe if you average it out to include night, it'd come to that, but in a place like Mexico I doubt it'd be that low.

      At last Mayâ(TM)s CeBIT trade show, Sun Microsystems (JAVA) demonstrated a solar Blackbox shipping container hooked to a 700 square foot array of solar panels, which produced about 10 kilowatts of power. Thatâ(TM)s barely enough power to support a single rack in a typical high-density configuration in a Blackbox (since renamed the Sun MD).

      700 square feet converts to 65 square metres? ~154 watts per square metre? That's 750w for 5 square meters - 2.5x your estimate, according to the article.

      Why store it? Pump it back into the grid and avoid all the costs of batteries. It's not a replacement for a generator. It's just a way to offset power demands and get some credit back during off-hours. And since you can get tax breaks to implement it, it may even be profitable for some businesses.