Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: The Best Place to Build Zero Carbon Data Centers in North America

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Thursday, May 8, 2008

The Best Place to Build Zero Carbon Data Centers in North America

[It is good to see a growing recognition by industry of the importance of zero carbon data centers. I think it is imperative that academia also move in this direction. As I have mentioned cyber-infrastructure is increasingly one of the biggest power consumers on many campuses and, as a result, a large contributor by universities to Green House Gas emissions. Funding agencies can play a critical role by developing Private-Public-Partnerships (PPP) much like the NSF has done with IBM and Google to assist universities to move their campus cyber-infrastructure to zero carbon data centers. Thanks to Doug Alder also maintains an excellent blog on this subject--BSA]

The Virtual Data Center - http://www.rackforce.com/blog/?p=59
Is Your Data Center Green Enough - http://www.rackforce.com/blog/?p=49
GigaCenter: Where We are Going - http://www.rackforce.com/blog/?p=48

The Best Place to Build a Data Center in North America http://www.cio.com/article/183256/The_Best_Place_to_Build_a_Data_Center_in_North_America

It's Kelowna, British Columbia, says IBM, which is working with Rackforce to open a huge data center in this small city far from earthquake and flood zones, close to cheap power sources and just a short flight from Vancouver.

But what most tourist brochures don't mention is that the Okanagan also is becoming known in IT spheres for something else: data processing and storage.

Thanks to its seismic stability, cheap and accessible power and a talented workforce, the Okanagan recently has seen a proliferation of data services vendors and has attracted interest from at least one major international corporation to build one of the biggest data centers in the world.

When it opens later this year, this $100 million data center—appropriately dubbed the Gigacentre—will total 85,000 square feet and will have the capacity to store nearly 35,000 terabytes of data. Put differently, the Gigacentre will generate more than 700 watts per square foot, while most data centers currently generate a maximum of 300 watts per square foot.

The Gigacentre is a joint venture between IBM and Rackforce, a local hosting service provider. It will be IBM's first data center in British Columbia and is powered by hydroelectric energy from the Columbia River

Brian Fry, vice president and cofounder of Rackforce, says the center, expected to open by this summer, will cement the Okanagan's position as the new data capital of the West—a position that could be particularly intriguing for U.S. companies who are looking to keep mission-critical in