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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.
It's at least plausible that such a concentrated consumer of electrical power could get some genuine utility out of some low-cost solar panels.
It's too bad the people in China are choking to death making these renewable resources. And Christmas ornaments... Ho Ho Ho!
Well something is causing the temperatures to rise, ice to melt and sea levels to rise.
squeak squeak.
I know AC I'm replying to was being funny, but major players like Akamai, which only uses multi-tenant data centers and sundry free colo, are also finding the ability to reduce greenhouse gases 90% per bit delivered over the last 6 years.
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.
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.
You know that 'buying renewable energy' from your energy provider doesn't actually insure your energy coming from the sun/wind. It insures that your energy company buys futures against any renewable energy producer, the energy still comes from coal/nuclear/hydro (whatever is actually connected on the grid when you use it and closest to you), but the price they pay on the market for said energy is at the cost of the renewable energy and is traded towards renewable energy companies, most of which are shell companies that use the profits to invest against other stocks while buying "their" energy at the lowest cost at some other point in time.
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Arctic sea ice extent minimum as measured by satellites has dropped from averaging over 7 million km^2 in the 1980s to mid 1990s to averaging under 5 million km^2 since 2007. Antarctic sea ice extent maximum has expanded by maybe 1 million km^2 lately. So total sea ice has dropped. The GRACE satellites have measured an average loss of 280 +- 58 Gt of ice per year from Greenland from 2003 to 2013 and 67 +- 44 Gt per year on Antarctic so they are losing ice. Most glaciers are losing ice as well.
Of course sea level is rising. The evidence is in satellite measurements and tide gauges all over the world. As the folks in Norfolk, VA and Miami, FL about nuisance flooding.
Solar flux has dropped from where it was in the late 2000s yet temperatures keep rising. We've been continuously monitoring solar output since the 1980s and there hasn't been enough variation in solar output to account for temperature changes.
But none of that matters to you, does it?
You know solar can generate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, right?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC