energy usage Archives - GreenMonk: the blog

How to build a Green data center – practical steps!

January 7, 2009 by Tom Raftery

I received an email over the holidays from someone who was building a data center and who wanted some advice on how to make it Greener. I replied with a few suggestions from my experience building the hyper energy-efficient data center at CIX and then thought why not flesh out my response to a blog post for GreenMonk so here you go…

One of the low hanging fruit in our DC design was going for cold aisle containment. This simply involves sealing the cold aisle (roof, doors and blanking panels – see photo above) – this stops air mixing and avoids the warm air from the servers heating the cold air you have just spent a fortune cooling.

Utilise free cooling as much as possible. With cold aisle containment, if you have cool ambient temps (10.5C/50.9F yearly avg in Cork) your room, if it has lots of airspace and is uninsulated, will do a lot of your cooling for you.

Source chillers which can also take advantage of free cooling. Place chillers outside your building if you are in a cool climate with as much pipework as possible also outside so that your ambient temperature again cools your water as much as possible.

Many chillers now come with multiple compressors that come on one at a time and then, only when needed. Chiller compressors use a lot of energy so minimising their use saves on costs and CO2 emissions.

See if you can get a dynamic feedback mechanism from your air handling units to constantly maximise the temp of the water coming from your chillers. Maximising your chiller output temp, as well as reducing chiller energy usage, also reduces condensation in your data center. The problem with condensation is that it requires re-humidification of the air. Humidifying air requires boiling water to make steam, which needs energy for heat, which requires even more energy to cool! So maximising your chiller output temp is a nice win, win.

Source super efficient UPS’ – we used GE Super Eco UPS’ – these UPS’ operate at up to 98.4% efficiency. That is a massive improvement over traditional UPS’ which were typically only around 75% efficient.

Go 2n on your diesel generators so that when electricity is expensive, you can not only come off grid (and poss sell your lack of use to the utility) but also start your 2nd generator and thus sell electricity to the grid (at a time when it is expensive – win, win). If you can run your generators on bio-diesel, even better.

Try to use the heat generated by the servers to heat your offices, your water, etc. using heat exchangers. Think of it as using your office as part of your cooling system!

Have high unobstructed raised floors and high ceilings so your air handling units don’t have to work hard to move the air around.

And maximise the temperature in your data center! Typical data centers operate at 19-21C (66.2-69.8F) but in conversations I have had in recent months with HP, Sun, Dell and IBM all have said their equipment will operate no problem in data centers at temperatures of 25C (77F) – reducing your data center’s cooling requirement by a couple of degrees would yield enormous savings but bear in mind too that it does reduce your resolution window if there is a failure in your cooling system.

GreenMonk interviews Stefan Engelhardt about SAP’s vision for Smart Grids

November 5, 2008 by Tom Raftery

One of the more interesting keynote talks at the recent SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio TX was the one given by Stefan Engelhardt, SAP’s Head of Industry Business Unit Utilities.

In his keynote he discussed decarbonisation and SAP’s vision around Smart Grids and Smart Meters. I asked him if he’d be willing to come on camera to talk about some of these topics and he very graciously agreed.

With the vast majority of the world’s utilities using SAP’s software, they have their fingers firmly on the pulse of this sector. What was pleasantly surprising to me was the amount of interest SAP is seeing from their utility client companies in Smart Grids. As Stefan himself said in the interview:

For the next couple of years we see a clear trend towards the deployment of Smart Metering technology in the Utilities industry… and that means we have to adapt the existing business processes to this new technology

It was also fascinating to hear Stefan’s predictions around how Smart Grids will be rolled out gradually by utilities. Polling of smart meters by utilities will be ramped up bit-by-bit from maybe once a day to once every 10-15 minutes and this will have huge implications for the amount of data utilities will have to manage. Previously they may have collected 1 terabyte every 10 years. With smart meters reporting energy usage every 10-15 minutes they could be collecting 1 terabyte every month, or less!

With the roll-out of Smart Grids, utility companies will be able to publish energy prices in realtime based on supply and demand. This is important because electricity is more plentiful when renewables are contributing to the mix, so cheaper electricity should also track closely with Greener electricity!.

Utilities will now be able to offer new products like critical peak pricing for peak shaving in times of electricity shortage and even demand stimulation, to encourage people to consume electricity when supply is exceeding demand. This will encourage people to shift some of their loads to times when renewables are contributing more, thereby reducing the CO2 emissions associated with that load.

[Disclosure – SAP covered my expenses to attend this conference]

Carbon account, meet lifestreaming. Lifestreaming, meet carbon accounting!

June 9, 2008 by Tom Raftery

I come from a Social Media background. I use blogs, Social Networks, Microblogs, Photo Sharing sites, Video Sharing sites, Livecasting apps, Social bookmarking sites etc. everyday. I generate a constant stream of updates about things happening in my life which can be followed via RSS or on my Friendfeed page (a feed aggregator) or on the individual sites.

Cool. Interesting enough I hear you say. So what? Well, lets just park that for a second.

Carbon accounting is rapidly coming down the line. Already we are seeing companies like BT and Verizon requiring lower carbon footprints from their suppliers. This is because carbon accounting will take supply chains into account.

Carbon accounting will be incredibly granular and will attempt to take everything into account in the life-cycle of goods and services. This will include electrical power usage, road mileage and air miles alongside expenses and financial returns.

To get buy-in from staff, reporting total power and energy usage will have to be made as simple as possible so that it doesn’t interfere with the natural flow of people’s work.

This is where lifestreaming applications come in. Encourage the people in your organisation to use applications like blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, et al. Then you can capture that output and route it through the carbon accounting software and ta da! carbon usage information accounted for.

Obviously it won’t be as easy as that, but if your employees are using Twitter, say, set up your company’s carbon account software with a Twitter account. Then instruct staff on how to message the software with what you are doing at any point in time i.e. “@bt-carbon-accounts – putting on the kettle for a cup of coffee” or “@ibm-carbon-accounts – hot today, setting the aircon to 19C”. This would also be especially useful for capturing the carbon footprint of people working from home.

IBM’s master inventor Andy Stanford-Clark has already done some work in this area. His house has a Twitter account and regularly sends updates like:

the phone is ringing (mobile)
electricity meter reading: 32100 KWH
outside lights turned off
outside lights turned on

etc. to Twitter automatically!

Will carbon accounting software and its requirement for constant inputs from all levels of business bring lifestreaming applications into the Enterprise 2.0 fold?