Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.