Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: Hewlett Packard, AMD and Others Aim to Use Wind, Solar Power for Data Centers

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

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Hewlett Packard, AMD and Others Aim to Use Wind, Solar Power for Data Centers

[A concept that originated with CANARIE funded Greenstar project, spearheaded in Quebec by ETS, PROMPTinc and CRC in Ottawa, is now gaining momentum around the world.
Large companies like AMD and HP see significant commercial opportunities with such zero or low carbon architectures. Excerpts from eWeek article – BSA]

Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett-Packard are teaming with the state of New York and Clarkson University on a research project to figure how best to use renewable energy to power containerized data centers.

Specifically, the researchers want to determine not only whether the data centers—such as HP’s PODS (Performance-Optimized Data Centers) can be run solely on wind or solar power, but also whether workloads can be automatically shifted between these energy resources without having to rely on a traditional electrical grid.

“The ultimate goal is to see if we can get 100 percent uptime using 100 percent renewable energy resources,” Steve Kester, AMD’s director of government relations and regulatory affairs, said in an interview with eWEEK.

The $674,000 project, with funding from NYSERDA (N.Y. State Energy Research and Development Authority) and private sources, was announced Aug. 1. It was developed jointly by Clarkson and engineers with AMD’s Research Labs. The project is entering its first stage, a 12-to-18-month phase where Clarkson students will experiment with managing data through a distributed network that is powered by renewable energy.
[…]
If the project works out, the end result will be highly flexible data centers that not only can powered by renewable energy, but can shift workloads between these energy sources as needed, according to Kester and Bryan Berry, project lead for NYSERDA. For example, if winds suddenly die down in one site in New York, then workloads can be automatically and reliably moved to another site in the state where winds are blowing, without incurring any service downtime and without having to rely on the traditional electrical grid.
“If the wind is blowing in Buffalo, but isn’t blowing in Albany, and we have [wind-powered data center] locations in Buffalo, we can shift the computational workload [from Albany] to Buffalo,” Berry said in an interview with eWEEK, adding that relying on wind and solar to this degree hasn’t been done before. “You have to be able to be a bit proactive, and you have to be able to respond to changes in the field.”
The challenge, AMD’s Kester said, is finding a way to reconcile the demand in data centers for constant uptime with the intermittent nature of solar and wind power. Sometimes the sky is cloud, and sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. If the project can determine methods for doing just that, it could go a long way in easing the increasing problem of power and cooling costs.
“We’re rapidly reaching the point where the cost of running the data center actually exceeds the cost of the technology in it,” he said.
[…]
“We know that renewable energy – solar and wind power – plays a major role in our future,” Alan Lee, corporate vice president of research and advanced development at AMD, said in a July 31 blog post. “How do we link this vital resource to the data center and I mean directly link power source to servers? (You know AMD is all about eliminating the bottlenecks!) That is one key issue—getting power from a wind turbine directly to a data center like an HP POD without building a traditional electrical grid between the two.”
For a state like New York, which trails only California in its concentration of data centers, a greater shift to renewable power sources could be significant. According to NYSERDA’s Berry, 3 percent of the energy consumption in the state comes from IT, and power consumption by IT in the state will double every three years at the current rate.
“We want to help [companies] run these facilities in efficient ways,” he said.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/AMD-HP-Others-Aim-to-Use-Wind-Solar-Power-for-Data-Centers-578864/

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Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
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