Renewable Energy for the Data Center? 55
rohar asks: "The ISP/Carrier/Colo company I work for has just announced a new 'green' program. Although this is a step forward, they don't have a comprehensive environmental sustainability plan. I have been leading an open renewable energy project and I think we have 2 novel ideas for scalable and reliable renewable electrical power, the Solar Ammonia Absorption Convection Tower and the Compressed Air Wind Electrical Generation System. Do you have new ideas (Solar PV has been done, for example) for renewable power generation and conservation for the data center and other areas of industry?"
Look inside first.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why exotic energy sources?
Your DC already has diesel generator infrastructure right?
Burn biodiesel or straight veggie oil! it's carbon negative (the fuel represents only a portion of the carbon in the plant, the rest of which is used for feed).
-nB
Find a good place for that heat! (Score:3, Insightful)
Water is a much better conductor of heat than air anyway.
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Great idea! But, practically speaking they are not put into place in most current cases. The piping, controls, and maintenance don't make the venture FINANCIALLY sound in our current schema. If your (and many others') i
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Good luck getting your local building department to agree with you on that one. Typically using 'public' bodies of water for anything practical like this will get you run out of town. In New England, we would love to start using Geothermal systems on our houses with an ocean source or water well as the heat sink, but some towns prohibit wells of any kind, and the DEC's conservation commission has took us to task on laying pi
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They set this up in the mainframe days, but I'm sure today there are racks of Intel boxes next to the mainframe helping to heat the building.
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Because the waste heat is very low grade - it's diffuse and not greatly above local ambient. By the time you add the needed piping, pumps, heat exchangers, etc... you've added greatly to the cost - but won't be able to not
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Use DC in the data center (Score:5, Interesting)
Put a single pair of load-sensitive, redundant power supplies on each rack and run DC to every device. One of these should have battery backup.
Yes, there will be a lot more wires but it will be a lot more efficient and have lower air-conditioning costs.
Speaking of air conditioning, if you can channel the heat to something useful, that's a plus.
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48V (Score:2, Insightful)
Offer rack-servers with power supplies that use -48V DC input. For the more common form-factors, e.g. ATX and a few others, these should be produced in enough volume to be "commodities" and priced accordingly, at least in as much as any non-consumer component can be considered a commodity.
The parts cost to produce 100,000 power supplies that run on -48V DC has got to be less than making the same 100
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Not what I meant (Score:1)
For ATX-sized PSes and other common form-factors, there should be enough demand to make these as a commodity and perhaps even as a vendor-supplied option.
For proprietary form factors you won't have the efficiencies of mass production but they should still be an option.
Re:Use DC in the data center (Score:4, Interesting)
Why don't we see more -48vdc powered PCs?
Where I work, we have commercial power and generators feeding an auto-transfer panel. The output of that feeds a rectifier which, in turn, feeds a big DC busbar with a bank of batteries attached to it. The busbar has a lead that goes to every rack in the comm center. Every rack has -48vdc powered cisco gear or an inverter to power PCs.
The AC to DC conversion is very efficient. The DC to AC conversion is very inefficient. However, the system never loses power.
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Check out Rackables [rackables.com] , be warned ahead of time they are rather expensive (but also pretty sexy) servers. I had the luck of working with them a few years back on a cluster, and their engineers have some really cool ideas.
For a while, I worked for these guys [lr-inc.com] , quite often we would be called in to do campus wide lighting retrofits to offset the cost of server rooms that were getting hungrier by the day. At least while I was there, no "magic bullet" to reduce costs in the
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Re:Use DC in the data center (Score:4, Informative)
Steady 24/7 load (Score:2)
Conservation might be the better tack. DC power distribution? Watch out for voltage drops though. Virtualization? Fewer but larger hard disks? There will be tradeoffs but there should be real room for improvement at the design stage.
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"open" - loop, or source? (Score:1)
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"Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."
There may be individuals in Greenpeace that don't fear the technology, but the organization's official stance is summarized above. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/ nuclear [greenpeace.org]
mini-nuclear reactors for the data center? (Score:2)
The idea that nuclear is the cure for all evils, including bad breath and ugly sheep is somethine we were supposed to have outgrown in the 1950s when people realized that "meterless power" based on nuclear energy was a pipe dream.
What about trying to reduce the power used (Score:2)
just a thought.
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Our previous High Availability database environment was Active/Passive clustering (HACMP or MC/ServiceGuard) where there was an entire failover server sitting idle in case of
Biomass (Score:3, Interesting)
- Grow plants (or algae) that have a high energy content and do not need good land. E.g. algae can be grown in salt water, switchgrass grows well in a variety of circumstances that other crops don't like, and kudzu grows whether you want it or not.
- Use the energy captured in these plants to generate electricity. There are various options here, too: extract oil from algae and combust that, convert the sugars in the plant matter to ethanol and burn that, or perhaps burn the plants whole.
I don't know which combinations of growing, harvesting, extraction, conversion, and combustion are most efficient. However, there is definitely a lot of variation here. Studies that have been done that prove some combinations aren't worth it (you have to put in more energy than you get out), and others are (you can actually supply the US with enough energy, without running out of space to grow crops for food).
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Remember, th
Dupe and duped. (Score:4, Interesting)
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So I don't know if it's poor posting of his intentions, or poor intentions.
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As an example: In my location in Canada, the solar isolation in the summer is relatively high at around 5kWh/day due to clear skies and long daylight hours at the 52nd parallel. But, in winter we have only 8 hours of day
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Any engineer worth his salt will tell you that there is a vast difference between calculations on a simplified and idealized system and actual design calculation on an actual design. Therefore, since you don't have an actual design, your calculation are meaningless for serious evaluation. Your economics section contains nothing but airy handwaving - no numbers. Therefore, it is meaningless.
Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Conservation Ideas
Rohar Piquipaille ? (Score:1)
Let this guy DIAF, with Roland, and Eugenia, Dvorak, and the rest of the zeros.
Keep it simple: (Score:3, Interesting)
I suggest keeping a "green" server farm simple by outsourcing your "green".
Where I live, (Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley,) I buy solar and wind power directly from the grid. It's not the cheapest electricity, but it is affordable. PG&E, a major electric company in CA, has very low carbon output per kilowatt hour. They also allow you to sponsor reforestation, thus allowing you to recapture the carbon generated from running your servers.
It is also possible to buy carbon credits. This is where you essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the air. At the consumer level, Terrapass [terrapass.com] allows consumers to purchase carbon credits.
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