Greenpeace report How Clean is Your Cloud? I saw mentioned in 3T magazine news is actually quite interesting reading. This year’s report provides a look at the energy choices some of the largest and fastest growing IT companies. The report analyzes the 14 IT companies and the electricity supply chain in more than 80 data center cases.
The report contains also lots of interesting background information on both IT and telecom energy consumption. I recommend checking it out. Here are some points picked from How Clean is Your Cloud? report:
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo – these global brands and a host of other IT companies are rapidly and fundamentally transforming the way in which we work, communicate, watch movies or TV, listen to music, and share pictures through “the cloud.”
The growth and scale of investment in the cloud is truly mind-blowing, with estimates of a 50-fold increase in the amount of digital information by 2020 and nearly half a trillion in investment in the coming year, all to create and feed our desire for ubiquitous access to infinite information from our computers, phones and other mobile devices, instantly.
The engine that drives the cloud is the data center. Data centers are the factories of the 21st century information age, containing thousands of computers that store and manage our rapidly growing collection of data for consumption at a moment’s notice. Given the energy-intensive nature of maintaining the cloud, access to significant amounts of electricity is a key factor in decisions about where to build these data centers. Industry leaders estimate nearly $450bn US dollars is being spent annually on new data center space.
Since electricity plays a critical role in the cost structure of companies that use the cloud, there have been dramatic strides made in improving the energy efficiency design of the facilities and the thousands of computers that go inside. However, despite significant improvements in efficiency, the exponential growth in cloud computing far outstrips these energy savings.
How much energy is required to power the ever-expanding online world? What percentage of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is attributable to the IT sector? Answers to these questions are very difficult to obtain with any degree of precision, partially due to the sector’s explosive growth, a wide range of devices and energy sources, and rapidly changing technology and business models. The estimates of the IT sector’s carbon footprint performed to date have varied widely in their methodology and scope. One of the most recognized estimates of the IT sector’s footprint was conducted as part of the 2008 SMART 2020 study, which established that the sector is responsible for 2% of global GHG emissions.
The combined electricity demand of the internet/cloud (data centers and telecommunications network) globally in 2007 was approximately 623bn kWh (if the cloud were a country, it would have the fifth largest electricity demand in the world). Based on current projections, the demand for electricity will more than triple to 1,973bn kWh (an amount greater than combined total demand of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil).
The report indicates that, due to the economic downturn and continued energy efficiency and performance improvements, global energy demand from data centers from 2005-2010 increased by 56%. Estimates of data center electricity demand come in at 31GW globally, with an increase of 19% in 2012 alone. At the same time global electricity consumption is otherwise essentially flat due to the global recession is still a staggering rate of growth.
Given the scale of predicted growth, the source of electricity must be factored into a meaningful definition of “green IT”. Energy efficiency alone will, at best, slow the growth of the sector’s footprint. The replacement of dirty sources of electricity with clean renewable sources is still the crucial missing link in the sector’s sustainability efforts according to the report.
The global telecoms sector is also growing rapidly. Rapid growth in use of smart phones and broadband mobile connections mean mobile data traffic in 2011 was eight times the size of the entire internet in 2000. It is estimated that global mobile data traffic grew 133% in 2011, with 597 petabytes of data sent by mobiles every month. In 2011, it is estimated that 6 billion people or 86.7% of the entire global population have mobile telephone subscriptions. By the end of 2012, the number of mobile connected devices is expected to exceed the global population. Electronic devices and the rapidly growing cloud that supports our demand for greater online access are clearly a significant force in driving global energy demand.
What about telecoms in the developing and newly industrialized countries? The report has some details from India (by the way it is expected that India will pass China to become the world’s largest mobile market in terms of subscriptions in 2012). Much of the growth in the Indian telecom sector is from India’s rural and semi-urban areas. By 2012, India is likely to have 200 million rural telecom connections at a penetration rate of 25%. Out of the existing 400,000 mobile towers, over 70% exist in rural and semi-urban areas where either grid-connected electricity is not available or the electricity supply is irregular. As a result, mobile towers and, increasingly, grid-connected towers in these areas rely on diesel generators to power their network operations. The consumption of diesel by the telecoms sector currently stands at a staggering 3bn liters annually, second only to the railways in India.
What is the case on other developing and newly industrialized countries? I don’t actually know.
NOTE: Please note that that many figures given on the report are just estimates based on quite little actual data, so they might be somewhat off the actual figures. Given the source of the report I would quess that if the figures are off, they are most probably off to direction so that the environmental effect looks bigger than it actually is.
608 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Power Week: Popular Gaming Consoles’ Energy Use Compared
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325046&
The latest gaming consoles consume more power than previous models but also provide more features, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). In a recent test coinciding with the holiday season, engineers at the research organization found that three of the most popular units — the Microsoft Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Wii U — consumed as much as 124 Wh compared to a maximum of about 88 Wh in a similar comparison performed in 2010.
The Wii consumed the least power, coming in at 30 Wh. Despite their greater power consumption, EPRI notes that all of the consoles still cost less than $5 per year to operate — less than a quarter of the annual cost of a TV or desktop PC – and feature improved graphics, memory and storage over previous models.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ISO 50001 – Energy management
http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/management-standards/iso50001.htm
Using energy efficiently helps organizations save money as well as helping to conserve resources and tackle climate change. ISO 50001 supports organizations in all sectors to use energy more efficiently, through the development of an energy management system (EnMS).
ISO 50001 – Energy management
Using energy efficiently helps organizations save money as well as helping to conserve resources and tackle climate change. ISO 50001 supports organizations in all sectors to use energy more efficiently, through the development of an energy management system (EnMS).
ISO and energy management
ISO 50001:2011 – Energy Management System
ISO 50001 is based on the management system model of continual improvement also used for other well-known standards such as ISO 9001 or ISO 14001. This makes it easier for organizations to integrate energy management into their overall efforts to improve quality and environmental management.
ISO 50001:2011 provides a framework of requirements for organizations to:
Develop a policy for more efficient use of energy
Fix targets and objectives to meet the policy
Use data to better understand and make decisions about energy use
Measure the results
Review how well the policy works, and
Continually improve energy management.
Tomi Engdahl says:
These 6 Charts Show How US Energy Boomed And Disrupted The Global Energy Game
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-energy-production-boom-charts-2014-12#ixzz3NGiyi8dL
Tomi Engdahl says:
Updating activity within Europe’s Ecodesign directive
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-efficiency/4437964/Updating-activity-within-Europe-s-Ecodesign-directive-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20141223&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20141223&elq=6f7efd769e4846b487de02bb8e856150&elqCampaignId=20833
Tomi Engdahl says:
Trees vs. Atmospheric Carbon: A Fight That Makes Sense?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/12/29/0237259/trees-vs-atmospheric-carbon-a-fight-that-makes-sense
Yes, carbon levels in our atmosphere are rising, it’s causing the Earth to warm and the climate to change, and our dependence on fossil fuels isn’t going away anytime soon. Yet even if we ceased all carbon emissions today, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already high enough that it is likely to result in long-term catastrophic effects. But getting that carbon that’s already in the atmosphere out of it isn’t a pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a solvable problem that’s as easy as planting a tree,
Weekend Diversion: The Simplest Solution to Rising CO2
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/weekend-diversion-the-simplest-solution-to-rising-co2-6b968a5f5e83
It won’t solve everything, but there’s something we can all do to help sequester carbon. It’s as easy as planting a tree.
And what you might not know is if you were to take a tree and completely dehydrate/dry it out, you’d find that half of its dry weight was made out of carbon!
For every year that an acre of trees is allowed to grow, undisturbed, it captures 2.6 tons of carbon per year. A single, healthy tree absorbs an average of 13 pounds of carbon in a year, with many adult trees absorbing three to four times that amount.
And it’s estimated that if every American family planted twenty trees this year, we would have a carbon-neutral year: where the global amount of greenhouse CO2 emitted by humans would be offset by the carbon absorption effects of planting those trees.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can IoT deliver energy savings or will it be another power drain?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/power-forward/4438286/Can-the-Internet-of-Things-deliver-energy-savings-or-will-it-simply-become-another-power-drain-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150112&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150112&elq=88120662e220454aaed2022b3c2a87b3&elqCampaignId=21114
While there are many people who question the media hype about the Internet of Things (IoT), what it is and how how significant it will be, most industry insiders agree that this nebulous “thing” has become a reality with potential for enormous growth. Even the lay public has some appreciation for this, having witnessed the growth in Internet connectivity through the evolution in personal computing from laptops, through smartphones, tablets and smart TVs to wearable devices. Certainly Business Insider believes this market will be huge – its 2014 report cites a forecast increase in the number of Internet connections from 1.9 billion devices today to 9 billion by 2018.
So what’s driving this growth? Well key to its description, the Internet of Things is about the connectivity of ‘Things’, not people. This means it is all about how data from remote sensors and the ever-increasing number of intelligent devices in our world today can be acquired and used to provide autonomous control in a smarter, more efficient way. Arguably some of the applications embraced by the IoT have been around for some time e.g. factory automation with machine-to-machine (M2M) networks that not only ensure a smooth manufacturing flow but also provide back-office data on production rates to facilitate more effective supply chain management.
Other IoT applications include smart metering for electricity, gas and water and even waste management systems, all of which have an environmental agenda. Building management is another example often quoted
But opinion seems divided over whether the IoT will deliver improved energy efficiency overall. Taken individually there are applications where there is an undeniable energy saving benefit. However there is the fear that collectively the growth in connected ‘Things’ that all consume power could negate many of the efficiency gains, especially devices that unnecessarily waste power as a consequence of their own inefficiencies.
Championing the former viewpoint is the publication FutureStructure with its belief that the Internet of Things will thrive on energy efficiency. It highlights the advantages of smart thermostats such as the nest product from Google or a similar device from German company tadoo that, by being connected to the Internet, allow users to manage their domestic heating requirements via their smartphones.
On the flip side, a Forbes article highlights an IEA (International Energy Agency) report claiming $80 billion in power is wasted by connected ‘Things’. This picks up on what’s colloquially known as “vampire power”, an expression referring to lost power when electronic devices are notionally switched off or put into standby mode.
Historically this phantom load was associated with appliances like televisions but this IEA report identifies network-connected equipment like set-top boxes, gaming consoles, modems and the like, which it says have been overlooked and yet apparently are consuming about 400 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in standby mode alone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why We Have To Kiss Off Big Carbon Now
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/15/230249/why-we-have-to-kiss-off-big-carbon-now
When the fossil-fuel divestment movement first stirred on college campuses three years ago, you could almost hear Big Oil and Wall Street laughing. Crude prices were flirting with $100 a barrel, and domestic oil production, from Texas to North Dakota, was in the midst of a historic boom. But the quixotic campus campaign suddenly has the smell of smart money.
One of the biggest names in the history of Big Oil – the Rockefellers – announced last September that they would be purging the portfolio of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of ‘risky’ oil investments. And that risk has been underscored by the sudden collapse of the oil market.
The Logic of Divestment: Why We Have to Kiss Off Big Carbon Now
As climate-change activists pressure public institutions to dump their fossil-fuel investments, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-logic-of-divestment-why-we-have-to-kiss-off-big-carbon-20150114#ixzz3OyjX3OSg
Tomi Engdahl says:
NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS on ’2014 hottest year on record’ claims
Global warming probably still on hold
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/19/no_scientific_consensus_on_2014_hottest_year_on_record_claims/
So the results are in. The main US global temperature scorekeepers, NASA and the NOAA, say that 2014 was definitely the warmest year on record. But they’ve been contradicted by a highly authoritative scientific team, one actually set up to try an establish calm, objective facts in this area.
On the face of it, there’s no dispute. The NASA and NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) statement says:
The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists.
But in fact, detecting a global average temperature rise – of less than a degree since the 1880s, as all sides agree – among thousands upon thousands of thermometer readings from all over the world and spanning more than a century is no simple matter. The temperature at any given location is surging up and down by many degrees each day and even more wildly across a year. It can be done, across a timescale of decades, but trying to say that one year is hotter or colder than the next is to push the limits of statistics and the available data. This sort of thing is why the battle over global temperatures tends to be so hotly debated.
You takes your choice of who you listens to on this, of course: NASA/NOAA/UKMetO or BEST, warmists or sceptics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EPA recognizes Microsoft as a leading green power purchaser — Microsoft currently purchases nearly 2.5 billion kWh of green power annually for its U.S. operations — enough green power to match 100% of Microsoft’s U.S. electricity use.
http://www.techmeme.com/goto/blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft-green/archive/2015/01/26/epa-recognizes-microsoft-as-a-leading-green-power-purchaser.aspx
Tomi Engdahl says:
The server carbon footprint smaller
The European Commission wants to define the data center’s carbon footprint. For this purpose, a pilot program was launched back in 2013. The aim is to harmonize legislation across the Union.
Products’ carbon footprint is referred to as PEF (Product Environmental Footprint). The Commission shall determine the PEF-category rules and leading manufacturers produce group specific, product life-cycle-based guidelines for the design and manufacture. The goal is to get a more detailed and fuller understanding of the environmental impact of products, as the current operating efficiency, based on the method of calculation.
Life Cycle Assessment to take into account the activity during the energy consumed in addition to product manufacturing, installation, dismantling and recycling of generating energy and resource consumption. Life cycle analysis provides both manufacturers and users a more accurate picture of the entire system environment.
The result is a holistic picture decisions which affect the green data centers and the installed IT equipment selection. For example, the operation of energy-efficient use of time, but an unreliable product, which is based on less sustainable design may not be possible, “greener” product line development.
Highlights of manufacturers and system integrators to minimize the impact of all factors, in order to ensure that the environmental effects of a balanced approach. Power Supply Architecture plays a key role in ensuring the right balance
The server integration, the degree of growth has made it possible to compress multiple processor cores and support the logic of the same SoC system circuits (system-on-chip), which are each card can be found in a number.
Only two decades ago, 150 watts of brick-class power supply realistic maximum. Now, up to a quarter-brick converters that take the printed circuit board space of only 21 square centimeters, can run up to 864 watts of power and soon even kilo watts.
This high-density power thermal compatibility with the environment is one of the key factors
Since the servers are the most important methods of cooling air conduction and airing, air flow planning is an important component. The open frame structure of power sources has become popular because of their structure to improve air flow efficiency. They also use less metal structures and enclosures. Their actual performance depends on operating conditions.
The open structure with respect to the direction of the air flow is much more sensitive than the closed structures.
In order to support multi-core servers, high currents and reliability requirements of the power supplies must often be used in parallel N + 1 configurations. THE REGULATION is the key to parallel architectures.
In order to ensure the correct functioning of the power source circuits future input voltage is very close tolerances, often less than ± 30 millivolts.
Digital control is more flexible and more efficient way.
Digital control can also reduce the use of materials through the use of cheaper passive components.
With the system-level requirements into the data centers of advanced IT systems designers to meet future stringent legal requirements, which are based on product life-cycle-based environmental impacts
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2355:palvelimen-hiilijalanjalki-pienemmaksi&catid=26&Itemid=140
Tomi Engdahl says:
What will happen to the oil price? Look to the PC for clues
Fracking analagous to move from mainframe to PC
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/14/if_you_really_want_to_understand_what_will_happen_to_the_oil_price_look_at_the_personal_computer/
Economics, of course, is simply a bunch of mumbo-jumbo – as evidenced by its failure to answer the Queen’s question regarding the crash: “Why did nobody see it coming?”
Theory of Finance scribe and Nobel laureate Eugene Fama’s answer – that economic theory insists it is impossible to predict such things – tends not to convince all that many.
However, it’s still true that at the level of microeconomics we can gain some useful insights into the future, even if we can’t make firm predictions.
The main message of “Rise of the ManufRacturers” is that if we want to have a way to think about the future of oil (and natural gas) prices, then we’d do well to look at how the computing industry has developed over the past 50 years or so.
The essential point is that it was in this time period that at the PC revolution took place. What had happened was that computing had moved from an economic model very similar to that of resource extraction and over to one of a “manufactured good”.
Similarly, we could say that the technology of fracking is moving fossil fuels (although not coal) from that one model to the next.
Oil extraction – resource extraction in general in fact – becomes more difficult over time. We usually start with the easy-to-extract stuff, but as we go on, and those simple deposits/reservoirs become exhausted, we need to move onto more difficult and more costly to develop fields.
Then along came the PC and computing became something that didn’t need vast capital expenditures.
Computing really changed the world when it moved from that resource-extraction-capital-heavy economic model over to one of simply being yet another manufactured product. And the claim is that fracking has brought oil (and natural gas) closer towards making the same shift:
Recent experience with development in new oil and gas frontiers such as the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan or the Sakhalin field in Siberia precisely follow the trend in computing. These fields are like mainframes. They will produce great volumes at decreasing per-unit costs when and if they come on stream. The expense and time to complete such projects, though, seems to rise at an exponential rate.
Meantime, fracking, a disruptive technology, makes low-cost manufacturing of oil and gas possible. The process began on a small scale. Over time, the technology’s application evolved in the same way as PC use. Productivity has increased sharply as per-unit output costs declined, which is what happens in all manufacturing process.
There’s simply no shortage at all of shales to exploit around the world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Public Lighting System Runs on Solar and Wind Energy
http://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/21594
A researcher at the Barcelona College of Industrial Engineering, in collaboration with the company Eolgreen, has developed the first autonomous industrialized public lighting system that works with solar and wind energy.
It is unique in the world
The prototype is 10 meters high and is fitted with a solar panel, a wind turbine, and a battery.
The UPC and Eolgreen design the first public lighting system that runs on solar and wind energy
http://www.upc.edu/saladepremsa/al-dia/mes-noticies/the-upc-and-eolgreen-design-the-first-public-lighting-system-that-runs-on-solar-and-wind-energy
A researcher belonging to the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Barcelona College of Industrial Engineering (EUETIB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and the company Eolgreen have designed the first public lighting system that runs on solar and wind power. The prototype street lights are 20% cheaper to run than conventional lighting systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 technologies that will disrupt climate change
http://decarboni.se/insights/5-technologies-will-disrupt-climate-change?utm_source=ob&utm_source=ob
Disruption is by now a commonplace occurrence in the technology world. It means when a new technology or business practice comes around and changes things in a revolutionary, rather than evolutionary way. For businesses, to be disrupted may mean that they can no longer compete in the same way with new contenders that are using this disruption. We haven’t had any major disruptions in the fight against climate change. Yes, we are making great strides, but for the most part our wins have been incremental – solar panels getting a little more efficient every year, wind turbines deployed more widely – those kinds of changes.
In this article, we’re exploring five technologies that are on the verge of disruption, that may remake the landscape of energy consumption and provide a radical, revolutionary change in our battle with climate change.
Autonomous electric vehicles
Transport makes up to 15% of manmade CO2 emissions
The first step in that direction, may be a fleet of small electric autonomous cars like the ones unveiled by Google. The diminutive autos are the opposite of high-performance, a small battery-powered electric motor pushes the cars to a top speed of 40 kilometers an hour.
LEDs taking over how we light the world
Lighting makes up 6.5% of the world’s energy consumption
we’ll need to make sure that our switch to LED corresponds with real conservation as well. Smart lights are the way we’ll make this happen.
Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)
BECCS is a technology that produces negative emissions. That means that it actually removes CO2 from the atmosphere while making energy instead of creating pollution. The way it works is that trees and crops are grown for use in generating power. These crops, through their growth, remove CO2 from the atmosphere and incorporate the carbon into plant biomass. The harvested plants are then used for fuel. If the plants are just combusted, that results in a “net 0″ CO2 level, the CO2 captured in the plants would leave the generator as exhaust — but if carbon capture technologies are used to trap the CO2 on combustion, that’s when the negative emissions are achieved. As a final step, the CO2 is then stored geologically, deep in the earth’s crust.
Near exponential growth in PV panels
Instead of Moore’s Law, solar panels are said to be governed by Swanson’s Law
Swanson’s Law states that PV prices drop 20% for every doubling of manufacturing capacity.
A great deal of the capacity for PV comes from Chinese companies subsidised by the government to produce panels at a very cheap price.
One person who is very optimistic about the disruptive power of solar panels to serve all of of our energy needs is Ray Kurzweil
Nuclear fusion: an energy revolution waiting to happen
Nuclear fusion seems like a clean energy solution that is perpetually 20 years away. Breathless articles tell us that it’s very near and yet — we’re definitely not there yet.
If commercial fusion does arrive in the next few decades, it has the potential to radically disrupt how we use energy.
The most ardent supporters of fusion even say that it could usher in a post-scarcity economy – that is, a society where the system of trade for energy, goods and services is no longer based on the scarcity of those items. Is this the sci-fi fever dream of a scientific fringe? – only time will tell, but the science behind fusion power is real, and getting closer every year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top HVAC controls trends for 2015
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/top-hvac-controls-trends-for-2015/341c305606452a02fd76d56636a713bf.html
As the world becomes more concerned about carbon emissions and energy consumption, the overall efficiency of commercial buildings will remain a key area of focus. The processes and products used by buildings in 2015 will keep evolving as manufacturers, integrators and building owners continue to experiment in order to find better ways of cutting wasteful energy usage.
Increased integration of HVAC controls with other building systems, such as lighting and access control
As buildings take advantage of automation to streamline building systems, using that automation to its full potential remains an important topic. In 2015, the industry should see many more buildings looking to gain more synergy among disparate systems in hopes of achieving better efficiency.
Further proliferation of smart thermostats is expected
Smart thermostats, such as the Nest or Lyric, have become a viable option outside of the residential space and have moved into the commercial arena for small and midsize office buildings during the past year.
Proprietary protocols continue to slowly make their way out the door but will remain present and important
Consumers in recent years have requested more interoperability for HVAC control systems, so that they need not be required to use a single manufacturer for the lifetime of a building. This led to control manufacturers slowly using BACnet or LonWorks to advertise to prospective clients that their systems were now open and ready for interoperability. While the claim of open protocols applies at the field level, it is not entirely true at the management level, as IHS estimated that 14.2% of all worldwide controllers in 2014 still used proprietary protocols.
Smart buildings, the smart grid and smart cities will increasingly move center stage
More efficient buildings make up just one step in the goal to create truly efficient cities. In 2015 as buildings continue to feature increased automation and smarter appliances, more communication and data points will be available. The increasing number of data points from connected devices will not only help a building become more efficient, it will also allow a city’s power grid to be better at limiting waste.
A raft of new regulations will take effect for air conditioners
Tomi Engdahl says:
The role of industrial networks in energy usage
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/the-role-of-industrial-networks-in-energy-usage/900daf5529f60816e0e031d2c519efb3.html
Energy costs big dollars for manufacturers, and most plants don’t know where energy is used, said Eric Scott of Molex Inc. Industrial network groups are working on interfaces to help. See the video.
In today’s world energy costs big dollars for manufacturers and the fact is most plants don’t know where their energy is being used. To help with this problem the industrial network communities are providing common interfaces to gather and control energy in the industrial space. This presentation will focus on aspects of energy where it relates to industrial automation and some of the challenges companies face. It will also cover upcoming initiative for interfacing to the Smart Grid for demand response request.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Distributed power control
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/distributed-power-control/53e5c646894074827f94c8a8b18320d7.html
Results from distributed power control include integrating power users with power suppliers with Smart Grid technologies and storing energy for peak load shifting, and evening the load from renewable (non-baseload) power sources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
French Nuclear Industry In Turmoil As Manufacturer Buckles
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/03/05/0430221/french-nuclear-industry-in-turmoil-as-manufacturer-buckles
“France’s nuclear industry is in turmoil after the country’s main reactor manufacturer, Areva, reported a loss for 2014 of 4.8 billion euros ($5.3 billion) — more than its entire market value. The government of France, the world’s most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva, which is among the biggest global nuclear technology companies. The loss puts its future — and that of France as a leader in nuclear technology — at risk.”
“Areva reported Wednesday 1 billion euros in losses on three major nuclear projects in Finland and France, among other hits.”
French nuclear industry in turmoil as manufacturer buckles
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/03/04/areva-turmoil-losses/24359947/
The government said in a statement that it’s working closely with Areva to restructure and secure financing
Areva has lost money for years, in part linked to delays on those projects and to a global pullback from nuclear energy since the 2011 Fukushima accident.
The industry employs 220,000 people in France.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vaasa-based AC drives manufacturer Vacon will tell you that the devices saved last year, about 62 terawatt-hours of electric energy. This corresponds to approximately one second 700-megawatt nuclear reactor in annual energy production or about 13.8 million households annual household electricity consumption in Europe. This corresponds to approximately 24 hours of the world’s electricity production.
In 2013, Vacon AC drives savings of 55 terawatt-hours of electric energy.
The inverter controls the electric motor rotation speed of the process according to the actual need, thus reducing the energy consumption of typically 20-50 per cent. Studies have shown that the frequency converters payback period is continuously reduced, for example, in pump and fan applications, the payback period can be up to less than one year. In addition, the inverter technology can also be used to modify the power of renewable energy applications.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2528:vacon-saastoa-62-terawattituntia&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the Internet of Things affects the data center
An enormous amount of processing and storage capacity is needed to keep pace with the Internet of Things.
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/how-the-internet-of-things-affects-the-data-center/7a1b6076ed3aedd0bbfd4641db734c25.html
The Internet of Things (IoT): an intriguing yet enigmatic term that affects roughly 2 billion people who live their day-to-day lives in some degree of dependence on the Internet. What is IoT? Simply put, IoT is the trend of connecting physical objects to the digital world. The term has been used increasingly in the last few years but was actually coined in 1999-still in the early stages of the Internet. Today, the information technology industry is in a constant state of change, shaping and being shaped by the needs of business,research, and private citizens (just to name a few). The most visible examples are the devices we use in everyday life, such as mobile phones, computers, smart watches, home security systems, automobile sensors, and the list goes on. These devices are not stand-alone. They connect to-and have bidirectional communications with-servers and storage devices located in some faraway data center.But here’s the clincher: according to Gartner, 25 billion devices will be connected to the IoT installed by 2020. This means a lot of processing and storage capability is needed, and needed in different ways and different times than what is currently practiced.
How is the IoT shaping our current and future lives? The use of social media, cloud storage, and mobile devices is the triumvirate that rules our daily lives. It is common to take a picture, upload it to a cloud storage site, and post it on a social media site. This is just a typical example of how we are connected to the digital world. But people also use their smartphones to pay bills, deposit checks, play music, scan a document, look up a movie review, pay for parking, order dinner, check out a library book, and gather key stats from a workout, to name a few. None of these things are particularly interesting or out of the ordinary.
But the routineness of these activities drives home the point: As a society, we have become so dependent on our digital lives that we are craving for increasingly more of our current analog activities to be replaced by computer-based solutions. Consequently, our reliance on the IoT will continue to grow at a rapid pace
While this has significant implications on servers, storage appliances, and networking gear, it also impacts the data center cooling and power systems, specifically the systems’ scalability, capacity, and provisioning capabilities. To provide the required power and cooling to keep the IoT whirring along,building services must keep pace with the digital world; there is no choice but to comply. In fact,according to a National Research Council report, next-generation computing platforms will have a greater reliance on redundancy and fault tolerance as the rate of performance improvements begins to slow as Moore’s Law comes to an end in the next decade
Based on improvements of IT hardware over the last decade, data center systems must adapt to operating at different workloads while maintaining energy efficiency and reliability. In electronics(including hardware, communication, and software), scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. But scalability is a pretty slippery term. Not only can it be applied differently in multiple industries, but its meaning can vary within a particular industry. To confuse matters even more,we can talk about scaling “up” and scaling “out.”
Scaling “out”-in simple terms-means to add more nodes (computers, storage, etc.) to the system. Scaling “up”-also in simple terms-means to build up on a single node within the system, like expanding memory or adding more processors.
Computers specifically designed to work in the IoT ecosystem must accommodate the new and diverse types of processing, networking, and storage requirements. And they might be very different from traditional rack-mounted servers or mainframes. They have a very high node density, which translates into high electrical density (W/sq ft). The high node count requires robust thermal management to deliver the proper temperatures inside the servers
A cartridge can be taken out of service (hot swap)without having to power down any components or disconnect network cables. This capability greatly improves system reliability and serviceability. And because each cartridge is “software defined,” there can be different types of applications running on different servers, significantly boosting computing flexibility.Knowing that 10 chassis will fit in a standard server cabinet, up to 1,800 servers can be installed in one cabinet, yielding total power per cabinet of 80 kW. These types of servers are aimed at the enterprise audience (e.g., hosting, analytics, gaming, and telecom, to name a few) and can significantly reduce the number of traditional 1U, 2U, and blade servers.
There are many factors that drive the size of a data center facility. But when considering the IoT impact on the size of the facility, a few important ideas emerge. The use of high-density, software-defined servers can significantly reduce the amount of floor space
many high-density server systems-including high-performance, software-defined systems-use internal liquid cooling.
Today’s water-cooled computers are akin to cabinet-mounted servers that are hot-swappable without loss of cooling or power to the rest of the servers in the cabinet.
By using water cooling, almost all of the fan energy associated with the air handling units (AHUs) that typically cool the data center is eliminated.
And when water is used as a cooling medium sent directly to the internal components of the computer, the water temperature can be as high as 80 to 100 F. Using water temperatures like these means that in most parts of the world, all cooling can be done using total free cooling or free cooling using only minimally mechanical cooling. This creates a huge possibility to have incredibly powerful data centers that fuel the IoT using only a fraction of the power that is used in a traditional data center.
As a part of a broader facility-as-a-service strategy, power and cooling systems will be operated using a greater degree of software automation, tightly linked to the actual workload on the computers. Using this approach on HPC systems can reduce the energy required to run the massive computational workloads for which these systems are famous. It also can increase node reliability and reduce backbone traffic by distributing those data across different racks. Having this distributed approach in place will theoretically improve energy use because nodes that have duplicated data can go into a low power state or even shutdown entirely based on how the workload is instructed to move through the system.
What’s next?
Based on industry leaders, analysts, and corporate executives responsible for charting the course of multibillion-dollar organizations, the IoT-driven by IT systems and facilities that make it possible-will continue to grow in number, but also in sophistication.
Far beyond today’s wearable fitness devices, microelectromechanical systems, sensors, and low-power radios embedded in a variety of devices will generate a wealth of information on one’s personal activity pattern, providing advice on howto alter behavior to improve health conditions. Although the raw data are gathered locally, the heavy lifting of data aggregation and analysis will occur in a data center somewhere, linked by the Internet. Based on these examples (and dozens of other cutting-edge technologies currently being developed by private industry, universities, and government agencies), the IoT will continue to drive the need for more reliable and efficient IT systems and data centers.
Another technology is being developed: Based on the daily intake of information gleaned from Internet,”augmented cognition” will help us sort through the digital clutter and identify the truly important action items. It is ironic that a solution to de-clutter our digital world comes from the same source that created the mess in the first place. This is the future.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cabinet for raised floor data centers
IsoFlo Cabinet isolates the inlet and exhaust airflow paths for efficient, cost-effective, and flexible data center design and operation.
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/cabinet-for-raised-floor-data-centers/64216f11e7ccdd9a4a8af6ddc38b506c.html
Tate Airflow’s IsoFlo is a fully contained cabinet designed for data centers. IsoFlo separates the IT airflow from the human occupied space so that a comfortable work environment can be maintained even when excessively warm inlet and exhaust temperatures are being realized.
ASHRAE 2011 thermal guidelines for allowable inlet temperatures and can allow for nearly 100% free cooling for the entire year in almost any location.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/03/12/0247252/new-solar-capacity-beats-coal-and-wind-again
Solar energy installations beat both wind generated and coal-fired energy for the second year in a row, according to a new report from GTM Research. While solar only makes up about 1 percent of U.S. energy, in 2014, it added nearly as many new megawatts as natural gas, which is approaching coal as the country’s primary energy source. Solar capacity grew 32 percent from 2013 to 2014 and GTM is predicting it will grow 59% YoY this year.
New solar installs beat wind and coal two years in a row
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2895013/new-solar-installs-beat-wind-and-coal-two-years-in-a-row.html
Photovoltaic installations are forecast to reach 8.1GW in 2015, up 59% over 2014
The report claims solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity for 2014 reached a record 6.2 gigawatts (GW), a 30% year-over year growth rate.
Key to solar adoption has been falling costs across market segments and states. While PV module prices remained relatively flat in 2014, whole solar system prices fell precipitously, leading to an average 10% annual decline in system prices, the report claimed.
System costs dropped by 9% to 12% over the course of 2014, depending on the market segment. Costs for solar systems installed in the fourth quarter of 2014 came in as low as $1.40 per watt of direct current (Wdc) and as high as $2.10/Wdc.
Only natural gas beat out solar with 42% of the new generating capacity. Coal-fired power represented 23% and wind generated power only 3% of new energy installations.
The U.S. residential, or distributed solar power, saw 1.2GW of capacity deployed in 2014 — the first time that segment surpassed 1GW in a year. More than 186,000 individual residential installations were completed last year.
California remains by far the dominant source of residential solar systems. But in the fourth quarter of last year, more than half of all residential solar in the U.S. came from other states — an industry first.
“Solar PV was a $13.4 billion market in the U.S. in 2014, up from just $3 billion in 2009,” Shayle Kann, senior vice president at GTM Research, said in a statement. “And this growth should continue throughout 2015 thanks to falling solar costs, business model innovation, an attractive political and regulatory environment and increased availability of low-cost capital.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tougher Light Bulb Efficiency/Performance Requirements for the U.S.?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-efficiency/4438853/Tougher-Light-Bulb-Efficiency-Performance-Requirements-for-the-U-S-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150312&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150312&elq=f4aa85ad09f84e2fbb88fb474036653b&elqCampaignId=22049&elqaid=24754&elqat=1&elqTrackId=c0319a00ad3f4e88be95afea4388ccac
The future could get brighter using less power for U.S. consumers if the Department of Energy (DOE) decides to pass tougher General Service Lamp (GSL) standards. The DOE is directed by law to evaluate efficiency standards for GSLs and publish a final ruling by January 1, 2017. The department recently held a public meeting to discuss their preliminary analysis results.
GSLs include general service incandescent lamps (GSILs), compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), general service light-emitting diode (LED) lamps, and organic light-emitting diode (OLED)* lamps. The lamps covered by the DOE’s study are those that that utilize a medium screw or GU24 ANSI base, serve general lighting applications, are not integrated into a light fixture, and have a light output of at least 310 lumens. (A maximum output limit of 2600 lumens is currently being proposed.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
US Wind Power Is Expected To Double In the Next 5 Years
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/03/13/1156245/us-wind-power-is-expected-to-double-in-the-next-5-years
The U.S. Department of Energy anticipates that the amount of electricity generated by wind power to more than double over the next five years. Right now, wind provides the nation with about 4.5 percent of its power.
US Wind Power Is Expected to Double in the Next Five Years
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/american-wind-power-is-expected-to-double-by-2020
Tomi Engdahl says:
Solar in California’s urban areas could provide 5 times the power the state needs
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2897288/solar-in-californias-urban-areas-could-provide-5-times-the-power-the-state-needs.html
Photovoltaic panels deployed in urban areas could produce 15,000 terawatt-hours per year.
The amount of energy that could be produced through solar equipment constructed on or around existing infrastructure in California would easily exceed the state’s demands, according to a new study.
Currently, solar energy deployments are complicated by the need to find space for equipment without significantly altering the surrounding area.
The study, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the amount of energy that could be generated from solar installations on and around existing infrastructure in California would exceed the state’s demand three to five times over.
The research showed that by using areas around existing infrastructure and brownfields, California could substantially how much energy it gets from solar, without converting natural habitat and causing harm — and without moving the installations to remote locations.
Land-Use Efficiency of Big Solar
http://www.rebeccarhernandez.com/biological-soil-crusts-and-vascular-plant-emergence/
As utility-scale solar energy (USSE) systems increase in size and numbers globally, there is a growing interest in understanding environmental interactions between solar energy development and land-use decisions. Maximizing the efficient use of land for USSE is one of the major challenges in realizing the full potential of solar energy; however, the land-use efficiency (LUE; Wm–2) of USSE remains ambiguous. We quantified the capacity-based LUE of 183 USSE installations (>20 MW; planned, under construction, and operating) using California as a case study. In California, USSE installations are concentrated in the Central Valley and interior regions of southern California and have a LUE of 35.0 Wm–2. The installations occupy approximately 86 000 ha and more land is allocated for photovoltaic schemes (72 294 ha) than for concentrating solar power (13 604 ha). Photovoltaic installations are greater in abundance (93%) than concentrating solar power, but technology type and nameplate capacity has no impact on capacity-based LUE.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Energy Company Trials Computer Servers To Heat Homes
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/03/24/1913230/energy-company-trials-computer-servers-to-heat-homes
Eneco, a Dutch-based energy company with more than 2 million customers, said Tuesday it is installing ‘e-Radiators’ — computer servers that generate heat while crunching numbers — in five homes across the Netherlands in a trial to see if their warmth could be a commercially viable alternative for traditional radiators. The technology is the brainchild of the Dutch startup company Nerdalize
Test trial to use computer servers to heat homes
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_NETHERLANDS_SERVER_HEATING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-03-24-10-30-37
Nerdalize says its e-Radiators offer companies or research institutes a cheaper alternative to housing servers in data centers. And because Nerdalize foots the power bill for the radiators, Eneco customers get the warmth they generate for free.
The companies said the environment wins, too, because energy is effectively used twice in the new system – to power the servers and to heat rooms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xbox One consumes $250 million worth of energy a year
http://nerdreactor.com/2015/03/26/xbox-one-consumes-250-million-energy-year/
A simple change could potentially save America’s Xbox One users up to $250 million annually on their energy bills; however, Microsoft is avoiding making any such changes.
Even when your console appears to be off, it continuously draws a significant amount of power just waiting for you to turn it on with a simple voice command. This poor design feature is an easy fix and despite repeated requests by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Microsoft refuses to solve the problem. Meanwhile, just try to wrap your head around how much energy and the subsequent millions of dollars that are being wasted right now, with more than seven million Xbox One consoles sold in North America so far.
Some progress is being made, but that isn’t to say that it is enough. Microsoft has reduced the power drain from the “Instant On” mode from 18 watts to 12.5 watts, but this mode is a standard default right out of the box and fails to give users the option to disable it during initial setup.
There is an option to do so, however!
Deep in the depths of the menus, users can disable this “Instant On” mode, but few are likely to do so.
“Instant On” mode once started out as the culprit for nearly half of the Xbox One’s annual energy consumption, it has been reduced by ten percent.
On one hand, Sony has fixed a major problem in their latest console, the PS4, by switching off its USB ports once the controllers are fully charged.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nation’s Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/03/29/2110214/nations-biggest-nuclear-firm-makes-a-play-for-carbon-credit-cash
“The biggest player in the beleaguered nuclear power industry wants a place alongside solar, wind and hydroelectric power collecting extra money for producing carbon-free electricity. Exelon Corp.,”
Nation’s Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play for Green Money
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nations-biggest-nuclear-firm-makes-play-green-money-29973292
The biggest player in the beleaguered nuclear power industry wants a place alongside solar, wind and hydroelectric power collecting extra money for producing carbon-free electricity.
Exelon Corp., operator of the largest fleet of U.S. nuclear plants, says it could have to close three of them if Illinois rejects the company’s pitch to let it recoup more from consumers since the plants do not produce greenhouse gases.
Chicago-based Exelon essentially wants to change the rules of the state’s power market as the nuclear industry competes with historically low prices for natural gas.
Nuclear plants provide about 97 percent of the electricity supply in Exelon’s Midwest market, according to company filings.
Exelon and other around-the-clock plants sometimes take losses when wind turbines produce too much electricity for the system.
“If the question is, ‘Are they under economic threat?’ I don’t think there’s any question they are,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
California Has Become the First State To Get Over 5% of Its Power From Solar
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/04/01/0247244/california-has-become-the-first-state-to-get-over-5-of-its-power-from-solar
While the rest of the nation’s solar power generation hovers around 1%, California clocked in with a record 5% of power coming from utility-grade (1MW or more) solar power sources, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group and the Energy Information Administration. That’s three times the next closest state, Arizona.
California leads nation in solar installations as world sees 14% increase
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2904434/california-leads-nation-in-solar-installations-as-world-sees-14-increase.html
California became the first state to generate more than 5% of its electricity from utility solar, according a new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
California’s utility-scale (1 megawatt or larger) solar plants generated a record 9.9 million mega watt hours (MWh) of electricity in 2014, an increase of 6.1 million MWh from 2013. California’s utility-scale solar production in 2014 was more than three times the output of the next-highest state, Arizona, and more than all other states combined, according to the EIA.
“We believe utility scale solar demand is set to accelerate in both the U.S. and emerging markets due to a combination of supportive policies and ongoing solar electricity cost reduction,” Deutsche Bank wrote in a market research report earlier this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Feds Boost Goal To 75k New Solar Power Workers By 2020
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/04/08/045244/feds-boost-goal-to-75k-new-solar-power-workers-by-2020
The U.S. government has announced plans to help train 75,000 people to enter the solar workforce by 2020, including a number of veterans.
The new goal is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot Initiative, which helps fund research, manufacturing and market creation.
Feds want to add 75K new solar power workers
Solar panels being installed
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2906294/feds-want-to-add-75k-new-solar-power-workers.html
In 2014, 31,000 new jobs were created in the solar industry, which accounts for nearly two percent of all new jobs created in the U.S. last year.
President Obama announced the expansion to a previous solar industry training plan during a visit to Utah’s Hill Air Force Base on Friday.
The new goal is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot Initiative, which helps fund research, manufacturing and market creation. The SunShot Initiative’s Solar Instructor Training Network works with 400 community colleges across the country for training, and claims to have already certified 1,000 solar instructors and nearly 30,000 students in the last five years.
Since the first Solar Jobs Census in 2010, solar industry employment has grown by 86%. There are now more than 705,000 jobs related to the solar power industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stop climate change by drinking Coca-Cola says Oz government
Just take the CO2 from power stations and bottle it for the cool, clean taste of salvation
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/08/cocacola_to_save_the_world_from_climate_change_says_oz_gummint_report/
If you want to understand the quality of advice the Australian government wants in the climate change debate, you need only need one passage from page 56 of a new report into the energy sector.
Discussing carbon capture and storage, which currently has “failed technology” status nearly the whole world around, the government’s Energy White Paper (PDF) says:
“If the CO2 can be captured before it is released to the atmosphere it can either be utilised in other products or permanently stored in deep geological formations. Australia has worked closely with other countries which rely heavily on fossil fuels to investigate opportunities to utilise CO2 in products such as carbonated drinks and plastics or to enhance the growth of oil-rich algae in solar bioreactors to produce biofuel.”. [Emphasis added]
That’s right: in a white paper commissioned and paid for by the government and endorsed by a minister, Australia’s Department of Industry suggests that CO2 be kept out of the atmosphere by … capturing it, stuffing it in cans of Coca-Cola, and releasing it to the atmosphere when the drink is opened.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Obama Said Global Warming Gave His Daughter Asthma
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/obama-said-global-warming-gave-daughter-asthma/
Clang!
You hear that? It’s President Obama dropping another climate gauntlet. The core of the president’s announcements late Tuesday was a set of initiatives meant to track, mitigate, and inform the public about the dangers of diseases exacerbated by human-caused global warming. But the vehicle for these policies was in its own way even more interesting: an anecdote about his daughter Malia’s childhood struggles with asthma.
“Malia had asthma when she was four, and because we had good health insurance, we were able to knock it out early,” the president told ABC News’ chief health correspondent, Dr. Richard Besser, in an interview that aired on April 8. Obama made the connection that higher temperatures lead to higher atmospheric particulate matter, which could have played a role in his daughter’s respiratory problems.
Back in 1989, scientific consensus was coalescing around carbon as the culprit for climate change.
In fact, Obama timed his announcement to the most recent USGCRP draft assessment on climate change and public health (which is still open to public comment, if any of “comment activists” want to take their skepticism somewhere productive). While it’s not final, the report shows how these connections get made.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Booting Up” a California Computer Efficiency Standard?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-efficiency/4439183/-Booting-Up–a-California-Computer-Efficiency-Standard-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150415&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150415&elq=32e16977841c4c9bb5457852642ca4ab&elqCampaignId=22552&elqaid=25360&elqat=1&elqTrackId=5e41a57163d741f2a657da83feef1f84
In March, the California Energy Commission (CEC) published their proposed minimum energy efficiency requirements for computers and displays. These two product groups account for approximately five percent of California’s commercial and residential electricity consumption, according to the CEC. The commission believes that the proposed standard could save 2,702 GWh per year, reducing consumer and business electricity costs by up to $430 million annually.
Computer products covered by the CEC’s proposal include desktops, notebooks, thin-clients, small-scale servers, and workstations. Tablets, game consoles, handheld gaming devices, servers other than small-scale units, and industrial small scale servers are excluded.
Strongly influenced by ENERGY STAR’s Program Requirements for Computers version 6.1, the proposal uses a Total Energy Consumption (TEC) approach which focuses on the limiting the computer’s annual energy consumption during non-productive idle, standby, and off modes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Increasing transformer efficiency
Transformers are fundamental components in electrical distribution systems for commercial buildings.
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/increasing-transformer-efficiency/266a2aa0de473faed9ffdb9a97ff4162.html
The most efficient way to transport power from point A to point B is to use the highest voltage available.Higher voltage equates to lower currents for a constant amount of power. Losses are a result of current and wire resistance (P = I2 * R). Therefore, decreasing current has a much greater return in reducing power losses than increasing wire size to decrease resistance.
A transformer is required at each point along the distribution path where a change in voltage is necessary. Power produced at a utility company power plant will change voltage numerous times via transformers before reaching the end user.
Utility companies typically use medium voltages (5 kV or 15 kV) to distribute power to customers.
The voltage may be boosted at the production source to a higher voltage for transmission and then reduced to a medium voltage at a neighborhood utility substation. Voltage is reduced again (typically 480 V) at a utility pad-mounted transformer to provide service to an individual building, then reduced to 208 Y, 120 V via a dry-type transformer in a building electrical room
The concept of using the highest voltage available also applies to power distribution within buildings. In large commercial buildings, 480-V, 3-phase, 4-wire power is commonly used to serve large mechanical equipment. Lighting is typically served at 277 V while 120 V power is needed for receptacle loads.
Today, as design teams and building owners strive for high-performance, net zero buildings, maximizing transformer efficiencies is essential. After a transformer is placed in a building and energized, it begins consuming energy and is never turned off. Even when a building is unoccupied and all loads on the transformer are turned off, the transformer itself continues to consume energy 24 hr/day. The losses of a transformer contribute to heat in the building. More efficient transformers require less cooling to maintain a desired room temperature, which in turn saves more energy.
on average, low-voltage dry-type transformers are loaded to only 35% of the nameplate rating
For common 3-phase dry-type distribution transformers, the minimum required efficiencies ranged from 97.0% for a 15 kVA transformer to 98.9% for a 1,000 kVA transformer.
On April 18, 2013, the DOE published a final ruling (78 FR 23335) amending its 10 CFR 431 energy efficiency standards for low-voltage dry-type, liquid-immersed, and medium-voltage dry-type distribution transformers.
For low-voltage dry-type transformers, the percentage decrease in losses varies from 29% to 36% depending on size
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oz energy company AGL promises to decarbonise by 2050
Pledges closure of coal-fired plants without carbon capture
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/17/oz_energy_company_agl_promises_to_decarbonise_by_2050/
Australian energy generator AGL has published a new Greenhouse Gas Policy (PDF) in which outlines “a pathway to decarbonisation of its electricity generation by 2050.”
The policy means the generator will do the following:
Continue to provide the market with safe, reliable, affordable and sustainable energy options
Not build, finance or acquire new conventional coal-fired power stations in Australia (i.e. without carbon capture and storage)2.
Not extend the operating life of any of its existing coal-fired power stations
Close, by 2050, all existing coal-fired power stations in its portfolio
Improve the GHG efficiency of its operations, and those over which it has influence
Continue to invest in new renewable and near-zero emission technologies
Make available innovative and cost-effective solutions for its customers, such as distributed renewable generation, battery storage, and demand management solutions
Incorporate a forecast of future carbon pricing in to all generation capital expenditure decisions
Continue to be an advocate for effective long-term government policy to reduce Australia’s emissions in a manner that is consistent with the long term interests of consumers and investo
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want to go green like Apple, but don’t have billions in the bank?
Cooling data centres without landing in hot wate
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/17/power_meets_green_apple_data_centre_heat/
Going Green: Strategy (Part 1) How much energy is required to power the ever-expanding online world? With data centres the factories of the 21st Century, this may be a conundrum high on the environmentalist’s agenda, but what about those building the new Satanic mills?
Last year, Greenpeace estimated that the aggregate electricity demand of the cloud (including data centres and networks, but not devices) in 2011 was 684 billion kWh, meaning that if the cloud were a country, it would rank sixth in the world in terms of its consumption.
Given this scale, regulators have taken an interest. A code of conduct on data centre energy efficiency published earlier this year by the European Commission’s Institute for Energy outlines 155 recommendations for making data centres more efficient.
To date, though, this move has failed to extend beyond guidelines, while participant take-up has been small.
For those running data centres, electricity consumption relating to powering and cooling servers has been calculated at about a third of the cost of running a data centre over its lifetime.
The drive to build a “greener” internet has gathered pace in the web tier, as leading data centre operators have turned to renewable energy to meet their burgeoning power needs. So far this year, Apple has announced plans to convert a former sapphire factory in Arizona into a $2bn data centre powered almost entirely by solar power, with a further $2bn on centres in Ireland and Denmark using renewable energy.
Google is turning to wind power after the giant signed a 10-year agreement with Dutch power company Eneco in November 2013 to buy the entire output of a new wind farm to power a €600m data centre, currently under construction at Eemshaven in the Netherlands.
This is the third such power purchase agreement Google has signed in Europe in the last 18 months, following two with wind farm developers in Sweden to power its Hamina data centre in Finland with renewable energy.
Sceptics criticise the move for being little more than a PR exercise, warning that the back-up power required to provide failsafe energy would undoubtedly negate any attempts by Google to reduce its carbon footprint.
But what if you aren’t Google or Apple and don’t have few billion dollars to chuck at a state-of-the-art facility? What are your options?
It is possible to power your data centre partly or completely by green power without having to make a massive investment.
“Some companies are looking at onsite power generation – solar panels or fuel cells – but onsite renewables will typically only supply a small percentage of your energy needs,”
You could also source green suppliers.
Got hot servers? Cooling zaps around 40 per cent of the data centre energy requirements, so this seems the obvious place to focus your efforts. “It’s the elephant in the room,” Hopton says. “Koomey’s Law states that computers are becoming twice as energy efficient every 18 months, but cooling is not following suit”.
Improving the efficiency of air conditioning alone – specifically upgrading to an evaporative cooling system — boosted the amount of power dedicated to the technical load from 540kW to 800kW.
However, radical cooling is not without its complications. 4D-DC’s upgrade means Bedell-Pearce had to invest in an Uninterruptable Water Supply for resilience, essentially several 10,000 litre tanks of water
The use of evaporating cooling has allowed companies to drive down their PUE, but with water an increasingly scarce resource, the environmental implications of tens of the thousands of litres of water evaporating into the air are not to be sniffed at. Hopton says data centres are in the same league as wine producers in terms of the water consumption. “With liquid cooling, you can reduce your water usage and keep your PUE,” he notes.
“The idea that you need to keep your data centre at 21-22 degrees centigrade is a myth,”
“Any server built in the last five years can tolerate temperatures of up to 40°C.”
Data centre layout can have an effect on energy efficiency, too.
Computational Fluid Dynamic modelling software is a useful tool you can use to model the flow of air and calculate where specific hot spots will occur – both now and in the future.
“This means that any changes to create energy, cost or carbon efficiencies must be modelled and proven, with a high degree of certainty, to have no impact on day-to-day operations. This issue becomes even more complex as data centres become more mature.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Major Advance in Artificial Photosynthesis Poses Win/Win for the Environment
Berkeley Lab Researchers Perform Solar-powered Green Chemistry with Captured CO2
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/04/16/major-advance-in-artificial-photosynthesis/
A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Utilities Battle Homeowners Over Solar Power
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/04/19/1510253/utilities-battle-homeowners-over-solar-power
Diane Cardwell reports in the NYT that many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar power, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. The economic threat has electric companies on edge. Over all, demand for electricity is softening while home solar is rapidly spreading across the country. There are now about 600,000 installed systems, and the number is expected to reach 3.3 million by 2020, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. “At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don’t keep that balance things go unstable,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Green your data centre – without ending up in the Job Centre
Budget and planet-saving technology ideas
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/20/going_green_practical_guide_data_centre_changes/
Going Green: Tactics (Part 2) Data centres are big, noisy places that seem to have an emphasis on generating heat and making lots of bright lights flash. The first time you visit one, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the service provider’s emphasis was on anything but the green credentials.
And of course you’d occasionally be quite right: there are DCs out there that don’t focus at all on the environmental side of service provision. Conversely, though, there are plenty that do – as they realise that there are savings to be made through the application of some care and common sense.
Consider something I spotted in Google’s blurb when I was researching this feature: “Google uses very little of the world’s electricity (less than 0.01 per cent).“
I think I’m justified in thinking that 0.01 per cent of the world’s electricity is still an absolute shedload – so even if a provider can lop 10 or 20 per cent off its power consumption, it’s both saving the planet and conserving a barrowload of raw cash. And if thousands of providers can do the same, it’s a massive deal.
As we all know, data centres have raw power coming in through the wall and into a bank of Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs). The smooth, reliable power is then delivered to the hosting rooms via copper cables, and then to the individual servers in the cabinets via power distribution units; diesel generators sit at the side to kick in when the power goes off to ensure that the kit stays alive once the UPS has run down.
There’s another radical idea, though, that completely capsizes the approach of providing UPS service in the data centre: in short, don’t. Look in a server power supply unit and something you’ll find a lot of is air. So why not throw away the socking big UPSs in the back room of the data centre and instead put small UPS capabilities in the server PSUs themselves?
Sounds barking, but it’s becoming a reality; in fact there’s a flavour of this called Local Energy Storage, or LES, that’s advocated by a small US outfit called Microsoft.
Similarly innovative is the concept of “adiabatic” air handling systems. The term adiabatic is defined as: “Of, relating to, or being a reversible thermodynamic process that occurs without gain or loss of heat and without a change in entropy” – or to take a more comprehensible definition: “[a process] that occurs without transfer of heat or matter between a system and its surroundings”.
Mainstream greenness for the data centre provider
OK, so let’s look at some of the things you’re likely to find in the average data centre these days.
First is the imposing control on airflow by building doors, walls and ceilings around cabinets (the “cold aisle” approach). If you can maximise the delivery of cold air to cabinets you’ll maximise the ingestion of it into the servers; this will allow them to run cooler, spin their fans less, generate less heat, prolong the life of the equipment, and minimise the amount of cold air you waste by sucking it straight out of the room without it passing through a server.
Next up is providing an incentive for the customer to think hard about power consumption, by lowering the default amount of power provision per rack and charging for overages.
Thirdly, it’s becoming more common to see data centre providers using solar generation to some extent – even if the primary use is for powering the non-system-critical services such as lighting and the canteen coffee machine.
What you can do – and why
In a similar vein, there’s plenty you can do – which is fortunate if, as I mentioned earlier, your provider is charging you through the nose if you want more than a handful of electrons.
First is to consider whether you need data centre space at all: shove your applications in the cloud and it’s somebody else’s problem (and generally speaking, the larger the provider the greener the systems they can afford to invest in).
If you do decide to host your own, think virtual: a blade-based server with single-power supplies and fan units shared between server modules, with VMware or Hyper-V plonked on top running dozens of virtual machines will have a fraction of the power footprint of the physical server equivalent (and will need fewer cabinets, too).
Play nice with networking
Look at the green options for your network kit, too. In reality, there’s not a vast amount you can do with power savings on switches and routers. However, even if you save a few watts by having (say) the switch run inactive ports at low power, and ensure that the fans are thermostatically controlled rather than just hammering away all the time, then it’s a start – so long as it doesn’t cost you much to implement.
Storage is another power sucker and the vendors are keen to try to promote their green credentials.
Flash storage will save power, but will cost you more to buy than spinning disks, and if you want to stick with spinning disks then the same’s true with cheap SATA drives (which are perfect for non-speed-critical applications) compared with more high-end ones.
And the vendors will also tell you to go virtual, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, and to ensure you turn on all the de-duplication options in order to reduce the total storage space requirement (the performance hit is generally modest).
Do I go green?
You should always consider the greenness of the data centre because it has a direct tendency to save you money. Use less power and you’ll pay less. If you use less power by virtualising and having less kit then you’ll pay less for both power and data centre space. And if you avoid using your own kit entirely and throw it on someone else’s cloud, then you’re even greener and most likely more efficient too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Green your data centre – without ending up in the Job Centre
Budget and planet-saving technology ideas
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/20/going_green_practical_guide_data_centre_changes/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Japan Looks To Distributed Control Theory To Manage Energy Market Deregulation
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/04/22/0352229/japan-looks-to-distributed-control-theory-to-manage-energy-market-deregulation
Japan’s power industry is currently centralized, but it aims to deregulate by around 2020. Coupled with this major structural market change, the expansion of thermal, nuclear and renewable power generation will place additional demands on the management of the country’s energy market.
Japan looks to distributed/cooperative control to help manage energy market deregulation
http://robohub.org/japan-looks-to-distributed-cooperative-control-theory-to-help-manage-energy-market-deregulation/
“Since the earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011, energy has become an extremely important issue that now involves the problems of nuclear power generation and the use of renewable energy. With all these areas, we no longer have centralized management by power companies as we did in the past, and instead, various companies can now supply energy. In addition, we also now have the option of selecting the company that is best suited for our needs from amongst various energy companies. Hence distributed management is becoming a key issue. “
Japan is aiming to deregulate the power industry by sometime around the year 2020, and with this deregulation, the power network is expected to become extremely complex. In the past, information was consolidated and managed based on centralized management, but after deregulation, it will be necessary to analyze power systems on the demand side and the supply side to ensure stabilized frequency tuning, and an appropriate power market must be created.
Frequency controllers are used to control power generators, and by running the generator itself at a constant rotational speed, we should be able to obtain power with a stable 50 Hz, 100 V supply voltage. However, when we add renewable energy and other power sources to the power network, they act in a form that is like noise, so the first thing that we need to do is implement feedback control with respect to those additional power sources so that a 100 V supply voltage can be continuously maintained at 50 Hz.
With consideration of the standpoints of both the power demand side and supply side, the Namerikawa Lab is leading the world in research to develop algorithms to find the most appropriate compromise between the two sides and to quantify satisfaction levels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tesla Isn’t an Automaker. It’s a Battery Company
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/tesla-isnt-car-company-battery-company/
Tesla is admired for building the cars of the future. But it’s not really a car company. It’s a battery company that happens to make electric cars.
At least, that’s the trajectory suggested by the news that Tesla will soon sell mega-batteries for homes and electric utility companies. CEO Elon Musk mentioned the possibility during an earnings call last February, and the plan was reportedly confirmed in an investor letter revealed yesterday. The official announcement is set to come next week.
Selling batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities may seem like a departure for a car company. But for Tesla, it makes perfect sense. An electric car is only as green as the electrical grid that powers it. And if Tesla’s batteries become widespread, they could help utilities take better advantage of inconsistent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. As demand for renewables rises, whether through regulatory mandate or consumer desire, so would utilities’ demand for batteries that could help maintain a consistent flow—a demand Tesla is well-positioned to meet.
Renewable power can come in fits and stops, depending on whether the wind is blowing and if the sun is shining, but the supply doesn’t always come at the exact same time as demand.
Tesla’s move into the electrical utility market isn’t exactly novel says Sam Jaffe
There are already dozens of companies offering battery packs for utility companies. But he says Tesla’s move is a validation of the market, and its scale will make it a major player.
“In 10 years the grid will be cleaner, less expensive to maintain, and more reliable,” Jaffe says. “And that will be thanks to energy storage technology.”
Tesla’s first expected foray beyond cars also highlights that the company’s battery manufacturing capacity may soon be its strongest asset.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Electricity, Energy and Global Warming By the Numbers, Part 2
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326346&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data Center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) Webinar
http://www.eeweb.com/news/data-center-power-usage-effectiveness-pue-webinar
“End users are moving beyond traditional IT space and demanding more flexibility as their needs change,” Villa says. “A smart modular system will enable IT to grow with the business, from racks to full-fledged data centers. Doing this cost effectively, however, will require a smarter use of power.”
Villa will describe how to develop efficient solutions for rack, suite and room cooling. This continues to represent one of the most energy-consuming parts of the IT infrastructure—second only to server demand. According to Villa, IT cooling must be separated in two parts:
the generation of cold and
cooling’s distribution inside the data center
Villa will discuss the concept of rear-door heat exchangers (RDHx) and how they have evolved. RDHx is a scenario in which servers take in cold air through perforated front doors of the server rack while air baffle plates at the rear of the server rack guide air flow directly to the RDHx.
Villa says that whether end users retrofit an existing data center or build a new data center equipped with medium/high density racks, energy savings must be the priority as the demand for data continues to rise
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rethinking energy performance
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4439300/Rethinking-energy-performance-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_systemsdesign_20150429&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_systemsdesign_20150429&elq=578c645627064bb6ac4df2f49ea8352f&elqCampaignId=22760&elqaid=25604&elqat=1&elqTrackId=98f548c6029c44b6b6ce83b5cdbd9c61
white paper by Ericsson because it takes a refreshingly different look at power efficiency in wireless infrastructure, especially with the coming of 5G in five years. Yes, we do need to have more efficient semiconductors and circuit architectures. Maybe some new processes as well will help meet the needs of power efficiency that 5G will need; however, we need to look at every aspect of the total system in order to squeeze maximum efficiency out of the 5G architecture as this paper suggests.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Key political trends in green building
Green building continues as a major push, with net-zero energy buildings at the forefront.
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/key-political-trends-in-green-building/f9c442caaf513ebbab90511eebc155a2.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bidirectional converter aids energy storage battery systems
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4439293/Bidirectional-converter-aids-energy-storage-battery-systems?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150430&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150430&elq=56473054049e4d6da070c9b168b294e6&elqCampaignId=22781&elqaid=25631&elqat=1&elqTrackId=6ed7a62592ad4929b2bd101f12c50103
Rated at 2500 W, TDK-Lambda’s EZA2500 bidirectional DC/DC converter automatically and continuously changes conversion direction from grid-side 320 VDC nominal to battery-side 48 VDC nominal for use in solar and wind-powered energy storage systems. The 1U rack-mount unit is also suitable for energy recovery, recycling previously wasted power from battery testers, robots, cranes, elevators, and autonomous ground vehicles.
When a 300-V to 380-V DC source is available from solar panels during daytime, the EZA2500 can be programmed to charge 48-VDC rechargeable lithium-ion battery banks. At night, the stored energy can then be converted back to high-voltage DC to power either DC/AC inverters or DC-input electrical/electronic devices.
As part of an energy recovery system, the converter allows previously wasted power lost due to motor braking to be used to charge batteries.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The World’s Most Wasteful Megacity
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/05/2352209/the-worlds-most-wasteful-megacity
The world’s most wasteful megacity is a densely populated, steadily aging, consumerist utopia where we buy, and throw away, a staggering amount of stuff
The World’s Most Wasteful Megacity
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-megacity
I live, fairly happily, in the world’s most wasteful megacity. It is a densely populated, steadily aging, consumerist utopia where we buy, and throw away, a staggering amount of stuff. Where some faucet, toilet, or pipe, is constantly leaking in our apartments. Where an armada of commerce-beckoning lights are always on. Where a fleet of gas-guzzling cars still clog the roadways. I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area.
That’s a considerable achievement, considering that there are at least 26 other megacities around the world, which, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, account for 9 percent of the planet’s electricity use, drain 10 percent of its gasoline, and create 13 percent of its trash. There were 27 megacities, worldwide, as of 2010. In 2020, if UN forecasts hold, there will be closer to 40. (In 1970, there were 8.) According to the study, New York is more wasteful, per capita, than all of them.
“The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,”
The term “megacity” is typically used to describe a metropolitan area that’s home to more than 10 million people—by that count, New York makes the cut. It was, by some counts, the first megacity, surpassing a population of 10 million back in 1950. Now, there are roughly 20 million residents
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rethinking energy performance
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4439300/Rethinking-energy-performance-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150506&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150506&elq=ab5ac0c37aaa4957b084f47f400f195b&elqCampaignId=22873&elqaid=25744&elqat=1&elqTrackId=d51aa20fe8bd458d9d129c03242e7811
Tomi Engdahl says:
See-through solar concentrator harvests energy from sunlight
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/tech-edge/4439375/See-through-solar-concentrator-harvests-energy-from-sunlight?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150508&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150508&elq=e96066c1db9b40a6858015d76abdb1c8&elqCampaignId=22919&elqaid=25798&elqat=1&elqTrackId=068493d042b04e14a99f0d2f9674839f
A team of Michigan State University (MSU) researchers has created a transparent solar concentrator able to turn any window (or other sheet of glass, such as the screen for a smartphone) into a photovoltaic solar cell. What makes this development different? The panel is truly transparent.
Earlier attempts at building transparent solar cells resulted in panels with tinted glass and/or compromised visibility. Lead researcher Richard Lunt, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science at MSU, says, “No one wants to sit behind colored glass. It makes for a very colorful environment, like working in a disco.”
MSU researchers used a transparent luminescent solar concentrator (TLSC) that employs organic salts to absorb invisible wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet and infrared light.
The device “opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a nonintrusive way,” Lunt says. “It can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality, like a phone or e-reader. Ultimately, we want to make solar harvesting surfaces that you do not even know are there.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Germany wants to get rid of nuclear power by 2022 and that is why the country will continue to increase wind power plants like mushrooms. All of them do not like.
The German state weather service DWD says that power plants rotors hamper weather radar operations. DWD’s view, this could significantly undermine the weather forecasts to score.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2811:tuulivoimalat-haittaavat-saaennusteita&catid=13&Itemid=101