Data Center Transformations

As appetites for data center power and the associated costs for providing that power rise, leading enterprises – particularly those in technology markets – are adopting renewable energy sources to maximize efficiencies and supply their own power.

Focal Points:

• IBM Corp. has developed and integrated new solar and water-cooled server technologies to engineer a highly-integrated system capable of supplying both alternating and direct current (AC and DC). The installation consists of a 6,000 sq. ft. solar array installed across the rooftop at the company's Bangalore, India labs that can deliver 50-kilowatts (kWs) of electricity for up to 330 days per year for an average of five hours per day. This accounts for approximately 20 percent of the data center's power needs. The solar-power system is in the process of being attached to high-voltage, water-cooled servers providing between 25 and 30 teraflops of processing power through a power conditioner that automatically switches between solar and other power sources as needed. A nine percent gain in energy savings is derived by using DC to DC power conversion where possible, as AC to DC conversion typically loses 13 percent of supplied power versus the four percent loss associated with DC to DC conversion. While solar power generation still costs more to generate than traditional power sources, per-unit costs are less than with diesel generators used in primary generation in many developing nations.
• Following the construction of a new data center in Finland announced earlier this year by Google Inc., Facebook, Inc. has announced it will build a new facility in northern Sweden located a short distance from the Arctic Circle. Also like Google, Facebook will use renewable energy generated primarily from hydroelectric power sources and make use of the year-round cool external environment to eliminate the need for resource-consuming chillers in the data center. Hydroelectric power is the least expensive form of electricity currently available.  When completed sometime in 2014, the data center will have more than 900,000 square feet of floor space – the approximate size of 14 football fields. Google's Iowa data center purchases power from nearby wind farms and Apple Inc. is reportedly planning a solar farm for its new North Carolina data center.
• AES Corp. has just launched a 97.6 megawatt (MW) wind farm located in West Virginia that has been coupled with 32 MW of battery power storage. In this particular installation, power generation can fluctuate up to 40 percent depending on wind speed patterns. The wind farm incorporates 61 wind turbines spread out across 23 miles of land with a capacity of 1.6 MW each and the company has more than 500 MW of advanced energy storage projects in construction. The battery storage is insufficient for long periods; rather, it is used as a buffer of sorts to smooth out the differences between power production and the needs of the grid. While more batteries for overnight storage and daytime release would offer even greater value to the grid, battery technology, sizes, and current costs make the economics of this practice unattractive today. In an unfortunate somewhat-related event, 500 birds were struck and killed by the rotors at the facility recently. Bird kills remain one of the unsolved downside challenges associated with wind farms.

Experton Group believes renewable energy costs are decreasing rapidly as new technologies and economies of scale enter the market. The differences among the announcements profiled here detail the various approaches in place at a variety of leading-edge companies. This lack of consensus is less confusing than it is demonstrable of the fact that enterprises can and should make use of the most efficient technologies available for the geographies where data center installations are located. The decisions of Facebook and Google to located in cold climes is a reasonable rationale given that data center cooling costs can account for up to 30 percent of energy usage. Thus, the radical reduction of this requirement is an easy and efficient way to deliver payback. This is especially true as computing demands are doubling every few years and heat density continues to rise as manufactures improve packaging profiles. In new data center construction, the availability of renewable energy resources should be among the top five criteria considered by IT executives. Existing data centers can benefit monetarily by adopting renewable energy sources as carbon emission penalties fall and sustainability metrics deliver associated goodwill with communities, customers, and non-governmental organizations. IT executives should have a program that continuously monitors, evaluates, assesses, and adopts power generation technologies from alternative resources as return on investment (ROI) requirements meet business goals. As technologies must obviously align with the specific requirements of data centers' geographical locations, technology reviews and payback metrics will need to be customized to meet these unique needs.