Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Pollutes To Avoid Fines
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Quincy data center, physical home of Bing and Hotmail, was fined $210,000 last year because the data center used too little electricity. To avoid similar penalties for 'underconsumption of electricity' this year, the data center burned through $70,000 worth of electricity in three days."
It was a perfectly sane response to the situation, and btw the generation is from hydro so really what added pollution was there?
There is a an economical way to store large amounts of electricity though, it's called pumped storage plant, basically it's a hydroelectric plant where the generators and turbines can be used in reverse to pump water back up to the top reservoir, then when needed it's released again to get electricity again. Turning a mountain into a very big gravity powered rechargeable battery.
Utilities make money by selling electricity, it's typically in their best interest to encourage more energy use. California and some other states have "decoupled" the revenue to try and fix this. Utilities are given fixed pricing; if the customers use less electricity then the utilities pocket the difference, if the customers use more electricity the utility loses money. Now it's an economic incentive to encourage customers to conserve, get rid of inefficient power generators, improve the distribution and transmission infrastructure, etc.
Windows 8 doesn't require a Microsoft email account. It merely highly recommends a Microsoft account that doesn't have to be tied to Microsoft email services (mine is tied to GMail). You're still welcome to use a local account and skip the cloud features of Windows 8.
This is a penalty due to a contractual obligation. It's not a fine.
It's still wasteful, though.
Actually, after RTFA, the real problem seems to be that Microsoft spent too long running off its emergency diesel generators - 100 times as long as its neighbour Yahoo (which was also fined for underestimation of use, and paid up without resorting to these sort of tactics). And it seems that Microsoft did not waste $70k worth of power, they threatened to do so, and even started to do so to make it clear that they were prepared to carry the threat out, but the utility settled for reducing the fine to $60k, and Microsoft called off the wastage.
I don't think that there are many ultra capacitors adding storage capacity to grids. Its definitely on the table for the future however at the moment the capacitor banks that you see at your transmission yards are actually for power factor correction not power storage.
There are not more than 8 factories that I know of, that are producing industrial-grade ultra-capacitors, that are to be deployed for the purpose of power-storage / power-stabilizing, near power generating plants and also in the power grid.
And all the factories are churning out ultra-capacitors as fast as they can.
But it is not enough.
That is why it will take some time for more ultra-capacitors to show up in places that need them.
The bottle-neck is with the manufacturers.
The main patent for the ultra-capacitors is owned by Sanyo, of Japan.
They were actually trying to find ways to develop an ultra-capacity rechargeable battery. They came up with the idea of using nano-scale materials (that was back in the late 1990's or so) and successfully produced a re-chargeable NiMH battery that can keep the charge for as long as 36 months, and at 97% capacity.
That patent was subsequently licensed to other re-chargeable battery manufacturers - including GP and Energizer.
And later, someone found that the same technique can be also used in enhancing ultra-capacitors, so they licensed it to capacitor manufacturers.
However, the industrial grade capacitor manufacturers in this planet that we live in happen to behave much like OPEC.
There are only few manufacturers and they control the market, and they restrict the manufacturing to only a handful factories - so that they can charge an arm and a leg for their products.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
On places where there is no dam, this method can not be deployed
Oh sigh.On places where there is no dam AND nobody understands how to transport electricity, this method can be deployed.
The netherlands USES this methods and the dams are in Norway. That is quite a distance, look it up on Apple Maps!