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Is a "Net Zero" Data Center Possible?
miller60 writes "HP Labs is developing a concept for a 'net zero' data center — a facility that combines on-site solar power, fresh air cooling and advanced workload scheduling to operate with no net energy from the utility grid. HP is testing its ideas in a small data center in Palo Alto with a 134kW solar array and four ProLiant servers. The proof-of-concept confronts challenges often seen in solar implementations, including the array's modest capacity and a limited window of generation hours – namely, when the sun shines. HP's approach focuses on boosting server utilization, juggling critical and non-critical loads, and making the most of every hour of solar generation. Can this concept work at scale?"
Four servers is a nerd's basement.
Wouldn't you need something like 4 racks full of servers? Running something like seti@home or distributed.net?
In its own building.
As a net 0, No. It can't work from solar. The amount of electrical storage would make it impracticable.
However, this is a good idea, not as a net 0, but for cost and sustainability. Having solar during the day would reduce cost and cut down the backup generator requirement. If there is a brown-out/black-out on the power grid, during the day, you have solar. At night you'd still need diesel.
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That thought this "Net Zero"?
http://www.netzero.net/
Why would my datacenter want freaking banner ads all over it?
At the equator... then you'd have some uptime!
They're actually building it into a genius bitcoin mining mega-rig! No overhead for utilities?! They're rich! Okay, just kidding...although I didn't see any evidence that they're not, lol.
P.S. my electric costs were $40/mo and my bitcoin income from it was around $54 so yeah....but FPGA miners can run at 14W and can alone hit 0.63x the performance of my own Radeon card rig (which ran at around 480W). So setting aside the bitcoin mining joke, no matter what they're using the place for, eliminating the utilities is HUGE! It easily blows away hardware cost divided by useable life for certain server types.
Just build a nuclear reactor in the same building complex and then build your datacenter around it.
If you're already assuming that a data center can include its own power generation systems (solar, wind, hamsters, etc.), then of course it's possible.
Just include a local coal or nuclear plant on the datacenter's property. Or, if the "renewable" detail is critical, create one in the middle of the Mojave dessert, with 30 sq. miles of solar panels, which during the sunny times also charge up a 400-ton array of lithion-ion batteries or a flywheel generator.
So I wonder if "possible" is really what you're asking.
They should build them in Nunavut.A couple of months are only daytime and it's cold enough that you'd be more likely to pay for heating to keep the machines within their optimum temperature.
No, they didn't.
Roughly speaking, there are three levels of "greenness", for lack of a better word. "Off the grid" means you're totally self-sufficient; probably solar during the day stored to batteries for night, combined with ultra-efficient stuff. "Net zero" means you self-generate a surplus of power sometimes and a deficit others, selling your excess to the power company and buying your need. Being "fully renewable", like what Apple announced, "just" means you're buying all renewable energy. If you read the article you linked to, you'd see that Apple will only be generating 60% of its need, which means it's far from net zero.
I'm not actually sure how much the last means in practice, considering that it's not like they have dividers that say "this electron came from solar so it goes to Apple, while this electron came from coal so it can't." So really what it turns into is Apple giving the power company more money so that hopefully they'll build more renewable sources. Not to say that I don't applaud the decision, and even 60% generation is impressive, but it is indirect.
You can't build something that will do the same job but not economically. These will remain concepts and prototypes until we can get a solar cell that is very efficient at a competitive price.
I wish this weren't the case... who likes being a slave to the grid but no one is making solar sustainable without absurd subsidies. The germans are making a big push for it right now which can only go to sad places because germany isn't known for it's sun and has huge energy needs. I wish them well and I hope I'm wrong... but it's looking to implode as soon as the maintenance costs start ramping up. We know a little about this in california. We've been building these sorts of power plants for decades. They work fine initially. But five years down the road everything goes pear shaped and you have another eco ruin in the desert.
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Really, this idea has lots of warm fuzzy, but it won't work as a general industry practice.
Take my current location: last summer we had epic heatwaves of triple digit ambient daytime temps. Using open air cooling those servers would be actively overheating just by being turned on, let alone running code. Generating their own heat, they would risk serious failures. In palo alto, where they have a cooling ocean breeze blowing inland and moderating summer temperatures, it might work. In the landlocked hellhole I live in, average summer hatwaves would devistate their servers horribly.
Then you have the problem with the realestate needed for the solar arrays themselves and with the low efficiency of current energy storage technologies, and the high voltages needed to efficiently power a data center. Solar PV is DC, and is not made to supply high voltages. To get the high voltages, you need to turn it to AC, so you can use a transformer. Then you have to turn it back into DC at the high voltage, so you can efficiently distribute it through the datacenter. That's 2 great big energy vampires right there. Add the weaksauce of current solar generation efficiencies, and you have a "are you smoking crack!?" Moment.
While you might be able to utilize idealized conditions at idealized locations to make a low cost data center, you don't get to dictate that more than half the time. Somebody in rekjavik could make use all the geothermal power, and freezing cold outside for a really cheap datacenter too. Doesn't mean somebody in say, bahrain could do the same thing. Its not location agnostic.
Likewise, the power content of solar rays is not constant across the planet, so the costs of powering with solar vs the land utilization costs needed to run a datacenter that does more than just sit there to look pretty are non-trivial, and may well be outright impossible in certain areas.
I don't see this being more than just a pipedream.
No this concept can't work at scale - 130KW means around 10,000 sq ft of solar panels -- all to power 4 blade servers. If they were in a c3000 enclosure, they could put 8 blades in 6U - so could fit 56 blades in a 42U rack.
If they need 130KW and 10,000 sq feet of solar panels to power 4 blades, they'd need 14 times more panels to power a 56 blades in a full rack, or 140,000 sq feet of panels, all to power 6 sq feet of servers.
So a small 12,000 sq foot datacenter can hold around 1000 times more servers, so you'd need 140M sq feet of panels, or around 5 square miles of solar panels.
That doesn't seem very scalable.
... Then the answer is probably no. I used to stack Dells floor to ceiling in the racks and never had a problem with power. Just interleave a PDU every so often and plug 'em all in.
Then I got a job at an HP shop. Started putting DL360s and DL380s in a rack. Breaker pops. Break out the clamp meter. No, the breaker's no defective. Those things GUZZLED. I have no idea what they did with the extra juice.
Anyway, if that's what they're using, they should forget about it. But perhaps their hardware has improved since then. People are paying more attention to power these days.
Can this concept work at scale?"
Almost anything can be done if you don't care what it costs. What I don't see here (or in the similar Apple and Google announcements) is any indication of what their cost target is. Does anyone have any idea what their electricity costs need to be (or what the average datacenter revenue per megaWatt is)?
You can pass the excess power on to the grid according to the definitions they're using. As long is you've given more power to the grid than you've taken out, you're a winner.
Does this experience account for the solar panel manufacturing costs and their environmental footprint as well? Even the most optimistic studies admit it is not zero.
You don't understand this electricity grid thing, do you? It isn't "dumped on the grid". It gets used. While it supplies power to the grid, either other generation has a slightly smaller load or there is a minute voltage rise (which causes things like ovens to warm up a tiny bit faster so they reach desired temperature a little quicker.) This is the whole concept of the grid - lots of generation that comes on at different times and is carefully managed to meet the load requirements. Has it occurred to you, for instance, that when a conventional generator is down for maintenance it takes power from the grid to supply lighting, heating and equipment? We don't say it is useless because it has to be shut down periodically.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The Enron system was set up to fail on purpose.
It was a political struggle. There is a huge struggle between public and private sector in my country. Anything the public sector has it doesn't want to give up. It involves power political blocks, money, power, unions, etc.
The system wasn't set up that way because the companies wanted it that way. it was set up that way because that was the law.
Most of the problems came from the state insisting that power be bought on a day to day basis. Power utilities don't like that. They charge very high rates for daily contracts and have much more reasonable rates for five year contracts. Prices spiked largely because much of the grid was forced to buy power daily.
I live within the confines of the DWP though and that was not a problem we had to deal with. As a public entity the DWP didn't have to follow the same rules and could make long term contracts unlike the private entities that were forced to buy it daily. As a result, my power remained cheap and reliable while much of the state was having black out problems.
The whole thing was used as evidence that power distribution should be a public responsibility.
In any case, the screwed up politics don't really matter. The tech isn't ready. If you want to waste your money on half baked projects then that's your business. God knows my own peers are always keen to follow up one mistake with another. I just wish they'd do it with their own money instead of everyone's and clean up their messes when they inevitably shut down.
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With the current management style, there will be so many reporting tools for middle management left and so few workers, that they'll need more than 4 servers per employee to fill in time sheets and surveys.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I haven't heard about that ISP for long time, no they are building a Data Center! It's amazing some of the things the things I don't hear about.
I'm not actually sure how much the last means in practice, considering that it's not like they have dividers that say "this electron came from solar so it goes to Apple, while this electron came from coal so it can't." So really what it turns into is Apple giving the power company more money so that hopefully they'll build more renewable sources. Not to say that I don't applaud the decision, and even 60% generation is impressive, but it is indirect.
The more people buy "renewable" energy, the more other people get non-renewable. But to be fair to electrical companies (at least what I can see here in Europe), they seem the be re-investing the extra money from the tree-hug^H^H^H renewable energy buyers into more renewable energy projects.
Sorry kid, it ultimately was set up and the responsibility of your state government so you've missed the point. Theives are not supposed to be able to easily take advantage of such a situation and it was a truly epic failure. Using screwed up projects in the ruins of that basket case as an example as to why any form of electricity generation is pointless and misleading because you could choose anything.
Sure it's possible to have a Net Zero datacenter: Just use unary coding instead of binary, with 0 as the unary digit.
For example, by binary number 101 would become as 00000.
See? As a result, all the bits will be zero. Net zero. That means the data will weigh less, and it's good for the environment! A win for everyone.
Not really. First, being off the grid typically isn't a choice people make when they have the option of being on the grid. It's usually what people do when they live in remote areas where the grid simply doesn't reach. And anyway, being off the grid is normally less green than being net zero and on the grid. Most people who are off the grid are under capacity for their needs, and typically they make up for that by running a generator sometimes -- which is very bad environmentally. (Battery systems that let you store energy in the day for use at night are extremely big and expensive, and I don't know how common they are in real life. They require maintenance and are dangerous if not properly maintained. I suspect that a gigantic battery is not likely to be very green, either. You have all those chemicals, which have to be disposed of when the battery reaches its end of life.) On the other hand, if they have excess capacity, that's energy that's being wasted rather than going to people who are on the grid, so again it's less green than being on the grid. And it's essentially impossible to have an off-grid system that has exactly the right capacity for your needs. That's because energy production varies dramatically from day to day and month to month due to clouds and the height of the sun in the sky.
On-grid photovoltaics are actually really nice environmentally, because they produce the most power on hot, sunny days, which are exactly the days when a lot of people are using air conditioners. The solar energy helps keep the electric company from having to fire up more generators and feed more fossil fuels into them.
Here is an article that touches on how some of this plays out in real life.
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ground level solar will never work to power the cloud. there's too much shade. duh.
Serenity now, insanity later.
On-grid photovoltaics are actually really nice environmentally
Depends on the location.
In a hot climate i'd agree with you. OTOH here in the UK on-grid photovoltaics are a fiasco that are only being installed because of massive government subsidies. Our climate isn't really sunny enough for photovoltaics to make sense and our peak electrical load comes from winter heating not summer aircon.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
... Beowulf cluster of those. Secondly, first post. As in the first one that I've ever done.
There is no such thing as a net zero anything when you look at the dust-to-dust analysis. Things always cost energy.
In this case, it is only a net zero proposition when observed inside the confined bubble of the datacenter. However, when you look at the total energy expenditure, it is hopeless to try to call this a "green" solution.
Currently, it takes about 30MWh of energy to produce 1kW of full-sun solar capacity. So, their 134kW solar farm cost about 4GWh. Of course, with a 30,000 hour full-sun payback cycle, the solar farm will never produce that in its useful lifespan of 25 years, let alone with most of its energy being consumed by the datacenter.
This is not even to mention the energy cost of building the datacenter, and the things inside the datacenter, maintaining them, and then managing the waste when they are discarded.
So, no, this is not a net zero project - not by a long shot. In fact, I would venture a guess that it is actually more costly from an environmental standpoint than just building a traditional datacenter powered by electricity produced from NatGas or Nuclear, especially when adding the toxic waste emissions from producing silicon solar cells to the tremendous energy required.
The Republic of Colombia sits between Panama and Brazil. Its population is the second largest among Spanish-speaking countries.
We run a datacenter in a LEEDS Platinum building...
http://www.nrel.gov/news/features/feature_detail.cfm/feature_id=1505
1. Spend $X buying bonds
2. Use a portion of the interest to pay electricity bill.
3. Re-invest remainder.
For some value of X, you will earn enough in interest to pay your energy bills.
X will *certainly* be less than the amount of money required to build your own mini-power generation facility. I understand the need for on-site emergency backup, but in terms of day-to-day operation, your own boutique power plant will be more expensive than buying power at market price from the grid.
Economies of scale, people -- we do not need to make our own shoelaces, we can buy them from someone who specializes in doing this. Energy is a commodity, and HP shouldn't be investing in expensive ways to make cheap commodities.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Usually that's what we call a guy with a CCNA and no real-world experience.
First off, the four servers are "fairly" beefy - four servers, each with dual 12-core CPUs, 64 Gig RAM, etc. and their datacenter include cooling (running air conditioning off of a solar arry seems like a bad idea, kinda like running a laser printer off battery power)...
If you really wanted to shoot for zero power from the grid, rather than throwing a huge solar Array at powering (and cooling) four big servers, why not re-engineer the datacenter to require less power all together? If we have to pack a dozen or so high-velocity fans inside a 1U rack server, maybe we should consider sacrificing space for power demands and use a 4U case that can tolerate higher temperatures? Why not investigate powering the datacenter off of DC, rather than several conversions to and from AC to DC? Why not study the concept of more lower-power CPUs instead of fewer high-power CPUs?
All they are really proving is that they can run a datacenter with a power requirement of NKW by building a solar array that supplies NKW x 24 hours worth of power every day in the few hours each day sunlight is available each day.
Maybe I should embark on a similar effort, put an HP microserver in a tool shed out back, throw up a few solar panels and deploy some batteries, then have my cable company run a line out to the shed and have my server & ISP router powered off the batteries charged by the solar panels... The microserver doesn't need special cooling, and it requires just under 200 watts electricity, so figuring in a small safety margin of 50% to power the cable router and loss due to storage/conversion I would need 24 x 300 watts about 2.25KW solar array and I figure a 24 hour battery that could hold 7.2KW of power (what is the proper scale for such an item? Half the daily power consumption?)
Only the 2.25KW solar array would be about 224 square feet - to power one little HP microserver 24x7 (or any 300 Watt load).
Ken
Here in New Jersey we are putting tiny solar panels on telephone poles to prove how stupid we are aboout green energy.
Ken
You know, powering the datacenter by burning wood is renewable. Just sayin'
Ken
Did you notice the size of the solar array Apple is building which, along with a bio-gas generator will only provide 60% of the power they need? You'd have to double the area to fully power the facility (double the solar panels and double the bio-gas generators) - this doesn't scale well with current technology IMHO.
Imagine how big a solar array that provides 100% of their power needs would have to be?
Ken
Where the rubber meets the road is: ? can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines in Congo that dig the coltan out of the ground for the warlords to sell to ICT companies, and can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that build the ICT machines in the data center, including smelting the aluminum out of the bauxite, and the electrical power needed to pull the Al out of the molten rock and then refine the remains, and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that smelt and fry up all the other elements needed (silicon, indium, gallium, germanium, etc.) and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines that deliver all of these components to the factory in China where all this crap is manufactured, and then can solar (and similar energy sources) power the machines in China that build the ICT and deliver the ICT to the data farms and homes and businesses that depend on this technology.
If yes, then industrialism can last for at least another century or two. If no, then no amount of wishful gee whiz thinking is going make it happen. Thermodynamics isn't just a good idea - it's the law.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Oh no I'm sorry small child (kid? really?), you've missed the point as to who was responsible for the problem. It was the state government's fault. The system would have failed regardless what the power companies did. The conditions on the contracts were unreasonable.
As to what thieves are supposed to be able to do, thank you captain obvious for you brilliant observation. Genius. How many years of graduate work did it take before you gained the level of education capable of concluding that the system shouldn't allow theft. Absolutely genius.
As to using examples, you've completely missed the point. These systems didn't just screw up around Enron. They've been screwing up since the 1970s. Do you know how many governments we've had since then?
You see this all over the country.
Think California is alone? We've been pineering green energy projects in the US since the 1960s. Everything you're dealing with we dealt with when your parents were still learning to shave... Kid. And the promises of green energy are always the same and the results are always the same. We have abandoned green energy projects all over the country. Ruins. Dead wind mills. Dead solar power plants... Everywhere there is sun and wind we have at least one in the state.
They work great for a couple years, then maintenance costs come, the money dries up, people figure they don't want to pay a higher energy price FOREVER, and the projects are cut. They fail so completely that there isn't even money left over to decommission the facilities. They just sit there like ruins rotting in the sun.
Enron has nothing to do with this. This was happening before enron, after enron, and in places enron never did business at all.
Think you'll magically escape it? The UK is already going through the exact same process. What is happening to their wind project. Ex-fucking-actly. Every single f'ing god damn time. I'm tired of wasting money on bullshit programs for bullshit technologies that have no business trying to supply municipal power. Possibly we could get Geo-thermal working but our last geothermal project was shut down by the same group of environmentalists that shut down everything. They said the geo thermal causes earthquakes. And they shut down the last solar power plant because it endangered the habitat of a tortoise in the middle of the god damn desert.
I'm beyond fed up with this crap. When the tech is ready, great... till then - sit down.
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The should of gotten Carly Fiorina to power the data center using all her hot air. They clearly missed the boat.
Notice that I wrote (in the first sentence no less):
Then you wrote:
Please at least pretend to be discussing things with me instead of some strawman in your head.
It appears I'm just seeing a childish backlash against alternative energies by an idiot that has decided to fanaticly back the more traditional electricity generation methods at any cost without understanding you are discussing it with someone who worked within that traditional electricity generation sector long before this site even existed. Blindly cheering for the team (which ironicly I'm on) doesn't get anything done. Considering things on their own merits does. Solar and wind have niches even if it's insane to use them for everything in a grid. Everyone that pushes "one true energy" is selling something or has been conned by someone that is. A mixture removes single points of failure (eg. cooling water problems in a drought year), covers peaks or allows longer maintainance windows on other equipment.
Small child, I actually did read beyond the insult which was probably a mistake since needless rude people are typically maladjusted idiots.
As to the first line, you blamed Enron. And you clearly didn't read the rest of my post where I pointed out that this was an issue long before Enron even existed. You know less about our situation then you believe.
As to your infantile need to cast pathetic little insults for no apparent reason, you're unlikely to gain anyone's respect that way. You say you're not America? Possibly in your culture people demonstrate their status by acting like jackasses. We have some people like that in the US as well... Regardless of their own personal delusions it rarely gains them any respect. You're basically quoting from the Donald Trump hand book on how to make an impression. Suggestions might include getting a comical toupee, painting everything gold, and then calling it "classy" without irony.
In any case, you have nothing to contribute to this discussion. You're an intellectual void as well as boring.
Good day, sir.
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Yet you still wrote the crap above? Note the quoted portion that showed either you didn't or decided to pretend you didn't. I suppose that removes all doubt that you think nothing of lying to me and seem to be arguing with a strawman in your own head.
What is it with this insane blind tribalism whenever someone dares mention an alternative energy?
Anyway, I wrote "kid" because from your comments it appeared you were not aware of more than recent events that could have been witnessed by a recent high school graduate, and I am of a vintage where I used to have to handwrite my technical reports and send them off to a typist. It was not really intended to cause offence as would another way of indicating I considered you ignorant of the subject matter. Perhaps your "small child" was intended as an insult, but of course I considered that ignorable and irrelevant because it has been a very long time since I was a small child - you should take that into consideration for yourself if you are so thin skinned as to see "kid" as an insult.
Well, I've been reading your posts and you haven't been reading mine.
So we're done. You have nothing to meaningful to contribute to any conversation where you read nothing the other people say and go out of your way to be insulting.
Kick the internet connection out of the wall and find a less annoying hobby.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Oh course you won't find it meaningful if you don't read even the entire first sentence - as shown above where I quoted it and your response that showed it never even made it into your brain before you replied. I can't help it is my comment on photovoltaics and co-generation plants was jumped on with a pile of emotional bullshit that didn't even have anythign to do with what I've written. So somebody with politics you don't like (and I've probably never even heard of) fucked up and for some reason you think that's an excuse to say entire industries that were well established globally before you were even born are a failure? Of course I called you out on such bullshit. There's more photovoltaics being installed in China this year than in all of those California projects put together.
Net Zero green datacenter? Already done:
http://www.aiso.net/technology-network.html