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Greener Colo: Service Providers Get Serious About Renewable Energy (datacenterfrontier.com)
1sockchuck writes: This week's Slashdot poll shows a strong preference for renewable energy to power data centers, with solar energy leading the pack. But until recently, only a few colocation providers have actually sourced renewable energy to support their facilities. A sign of progress is the commitment by Equinix, the world's largest colo provider, to shift to 100 percent renewable energy for the more than 100 data centers it operates across the world. The company is seeking to accomplish this through power purchase agreements and buying green power from utilities that offer it. Equinix is also testing both on-site solar arrays and fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which is slowly gaining traction in data centers. Although hyperscale cloud companies are sourcing more green energy, the Natural Resources Defense Council has targeted the multi-tenant data center sector as a source for huge potential gains in renewables.
"see? we're doing something. leave us alone, government."
Fancy that, you buy renewables and renewables do well. Who woulda thunk it.
Now if we could just get all these people who cry for government intervention into the matter to actually put their money where their mouth is we'd likely reach the tipping point in no time and without having to put up with the children' tedious fighting in DC.
This week's Slashdot poll shows a strong preference for someone else to use renewable energy. That, and a preference for 12-hour per day data centers.
never gonna let me down!
I watch the news and it's a FACT that global warming is not real.
It's too bad the people in China are choking to death making these renewable resources. And Christmas ornaments... Ho Ho Ho!
Although hyperscale cloud companies are sourcing more green energy
It is fine and dandy that hyperscale is moving to green energy, but I work for one of the really major players. We've gone to plaidscale cloud deployment, but so far we can't find any green energy sources that can scale to plaid.
since they hate us and want us to die. They kill millions every single year with their pollution. With their pollution.
squeak squeak.
Equinix are extremely expensive compared to many other co-lo's.
Their service is also abysmal - requiring you to escalate to your account manager for every single case, or you'll wait days for an acknowledgement.
Not to be forgotten is effectively having a giant UPS and being more resistant to the increasing price gouging of energy utilities.
I'm just glad to see renewables doing well. I must be old... I remember when Reagan yanked the solar panels off the White House, and solar was some hippie thing, or used to power a weather station deep in a national forest.
The real reason why solar is going well is because China hacked US solar companies, then was able to make panels for less than the cost of rare earths, destroying researchers... but the side effect of this was that it got solar energy momentum, and with protective tariffs in place, the solar industry is doing better.
Even though the means were shitty, China making panels and getting them on the market cheap was the impetus for the wholesale move to 100% renewables we are seeing now. Without them doing that, solar would still be on the sidelines.
These days, solar is a "why not?" item. If you have a south facing roof (or north if on the other side of the Equator), it just makes sense to add panels and an inverter, or panels, charge controller, battery bank, inverter, and dedicated solar circuits [1] if off-grid usage is desired.
[1]: For a house, having a circuit or two that isn't connected to the grid gives you the same functionality as a whole-house UPS, as well as a circuit where all the parasitic watt sucking devices can go on, so they are not running up the electric meter. This also wouldn't just be for devices, but things like refrigerators or sump pumps, which need to work even if the electricity is out.
Any plan to reduce carbon output that does not include the use of nuclear power is not serious.
Unreliable energy sources like wind and solar cannot power a first world economy. Any use of bio-fuel is based on unrealistic conversion efficiencies of converting solar power into usable energy by using plant life as in intermediary, or they are just "green washing" the burning of fossil fuels since we are still using fossil fuels to transport, harvest, and fertilize those plants. These unreliable energy sources require lots of land to capture wind, wave, or sun, and there just is not enough of it to go around.
Any claims that the use of nuclear power is going to kill us all is laughable to me if the claims of global warming from burning fossil fuels is true. Right now, after over fifty years of government subsidy of unreliable energy we have less than 3% of our grid power coming from these sources. At this rate we'll all be baked to a crisp before we build enough unreliable energy to replace coal. I think we can manage a little bit of nuclear waste to avoid the catastrophe that is global warming, that is assuming the threat is real.
Even using old school nuclear, with steam turbines and solid fuel rods, we'd be better off using it than not. Fortunately we now have better ways to harness nuclear power with molten salt reactors. MSRs can burn up all the uranium or thorium fuel without reprocessing, as oppose to the less than 1% efficiency we get now with once through solid fuel. MSRs can even use the old solid fuel waste as fuel. With MSRs we could produce valuable radio isotopes for industry, science, and medicine, something that is prohibitively expensive now with solid fuel reactors.
The best things about nuclear power is it works when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and the rain doesn't fall. It will also do this in any location on this planet. MSRs cannot melt down like solid fuel reactors so putting them in places where we would not even think of putting a solid fuel reactor is possible. They can also be built much smaller than a traditional nuclear power plant, meaning they cost much less to build and operate.
Conserving energy is nice but that does not eliminate burning fossil fuels, it only prolongs the inevitable. Using wind, solar, and hydro where it can be profitable is just good business and therefore will happen whether or not the government subsidizes it. Trying to make unreliable energy where it cannot be profitable, and relying on government subsidy to make it work, is just green washing on another level. Our economy runs on fossil fuels so taxing coal to subsidize wind only makes us rely on the coal even more, not less.
Bloom boxes and solar panels can get us only so far. To eliminate the burning of coal requires an energy source that is equally reliable and inexpensive and, barring some leap in technology, that means nuclear fission power.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nobody writes efficient code anymore, most new software just cavalierly rapes the cpu when it does not have to. But the PHB wants the product NOW, she does not want a good product, just one that works, efficiency be damned.
There is huge potential for environmental savings in the computing sector, but the answer is writing more efficient code. Everything will run faster and take less energy.
Despite the concerted enormous political bribes from the oil coal and utility industries solar and wind power is coming. In isolated cases these reactionary forces may be able to delay adoption of alternate energy sources but the implacable logic of Capitalism is unstoppable. And I'm cynical enough to think that politicians know this and are deliberately plucking money from decaying industries.