Intel Testing Solar Power For Data Centers 66
miller60 writes "Intel has installed solar panels at a New Mexico facility to test the potential for using photovoltaic solar power in data centers. Solar has proven impractical in data centers thus far for reasons of cost (too high) and capacity (too low). Intel will test the 10-KW solar array with data center containers and as supplemental power for summer capacity challenges, and says the project is a first step toward solar data centers. The project is housed at the New Mexico site of Intel's recent research in air side economizers in data center cooling."
Re:I'd think solar HVAC would come before PV. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just thought I'd add: here's an example [google.com] solar air conditioner. Some are even reversible and can become heat pumps in the wintertime.
Re:Solar is starting to become promising (Score:4, Interesting)
People throw the word "green economy" around without really thinking about it, but you just gave the most succinctly excellent example of it I've ever read. What a great move.
Re:Core 2 Duo Thermal is the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Been there, done that (Score:4, Interesting)
I designed, installed and maintain a 10kw solar array last year to power our businesses servers and offer a large (2900 amp hour) uninterpretable power supply during prolonged grid outages.
We recapture the waste heat during the winter to heat our facility at night. During the summer we vent that heat directly to the outside, and only use the AC as auxiliary cooling. It works excellently.
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=sb_success.sb_successstories2008_johnsonbraund [energystar.gov]
Do the math, folks (Score:4, Interesting)
The numbers on this are super dismal. To power a 300W server, you need about 5 square meters of solar collector. About $12,000 of panels to offset 2 cents an hour of power. Plus you need tons of storage batteries or substitute power for night and cloudy days. Yuck. A sensible company would only do this for PR or due to some government mandate or tax credit. Certainly not to save money or save energy.
Re:Solar is starting to become promising (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not green economy, it's just economics coupled with things they don't teach you at business school. (I hold degrees in German and International Business). What holds most people up is that the rate of return and ROI calculations aren't quite that good from an accounting stand point. It still takes about 7-12 years to pay for itself ceteris paribus. That is if you just calculate the cost savings off the utilities. Then you can add some future present value if you were to invest the money in the analysis if you want to get complicated. But in this market, where do you want to invest? Now it maybe true that for, say an average home owner, solar has not come down to the point where it can be declared feasible. But there are some other intangibles that are hard to put a number to down on paper. i.e., if we use the extra cash flow and spend it on marketing, or another developer, etc., what are the potential payoffs?
What we do know is that utility prices are unlikely to go down and the new developer is already paying dividends. We have a new product release ready to ship at the end of the month. Without him, it would have been March or April. If all goes well, then the cost of the solar panels could be recovered in as little as 18 months and we're getting started on the next phase of the project 2 months ahead of schedule and we can do so with little or no change in exiting net cash flow.
I wish I could say they taught me this at college, which taking 4 semesters of Econ did help, but I learned about sunk costs and how to factor risk into ROI considerations from our family farms when I took a year off from work before I started graduate school to learn how to run them with my Dad. (We rent the farms, but take an active role in managing the business side of things like selling on the futures market, etc..) An example was putting up grain storage bins. It was taking over 3 weeks to harvest the rice when we had to take it to the dryer, they could manage to unload 2, maybe 3 truck loads a day. That's 3 weeks where $500k worth of crops were sitting out in the field. All it takes is a hail storm or high winds, and you can cut that number by 30% or more. (It happened this year, Hurricane Ike knocked the yields down by about 30 - 40 bushels per acre, and at $5.50 a bushel it adds up). For $50k we could put up storage on the farm. It now takes 3 days (or 2 long days) to harvest all the farms. So a ready crop is now sitting out in the field a very short period of time. How long is it going to take to recoup the ROI there? Well if you look at the raw numbers, about 15 years. But if you get your crop in once before a hurricane Ike comes around, suddenly they've just paid for themselves. Now granted, my Dad is a retired executive that spent his entire career on the finance side of things at a large company. So I've grown up around looking at things...differently than my peers.
On the farms, we hedge. In a sense, that is what we are doing here. We are hedging that utility prices in our area will continue to rise over the next 15 - 20 years. But more over, we think we an invest the savings into other projects that will in turn pay off more than the cost of the solar panels. So it made sense in our case.
Re:I'd think solar HVAC would come before PV. (Score:0, Interesting)
Well, generally speaking, solar is a great idea, but as you've already established, solar is insufficient due to it's relative lack of density. That should not become the end of the discussion though.
My Manhattan-based ISP and telecom company runs a small data center, and we have researched this issue in depth. What we ended up with is a co-generation system.
Instead of buying a diesel or natural gas generator for power back-up against grid outages which becomes an unproductive sunk cost as soon as paid for we purchased a micro-turbine co-generation system, and now make our own primary power using natural gas at a net savings per KWH to grid power. The grid becomes our back-up.
The project cost came out to about the same as the generator option, but we've significantly lowered both our operating costs (even net of contract costs) and our environmental footprint.
We needed only 60kw, and are initially using only about 1/2 of that. In a MW-scale facility a natural gas fuel cell would probably become the technology of choice, and would accomplish much the same thing.
The key to why co-generation is a big improvement environmentally (and the source of even greater operating cost savings than I've yet indicated) is that the heat exhaust from the turbine-electric generation stage is harnessed to drive our air conditioning compressors without consuming additional fuel. In effect, we've reduced our electrical load requirements by about 1/3 by eliminating air conditioning as an electrically-driven application (other than the circulation fans and controls).
Had we owned the building we are in, we would have scaled the project up enough to serve the electric, HVAC and hot water needs of the other tenants as well. There are already a few commercial and condo buildings in NYC being operated this way, but word of the availability of this technology at such small scale is not yet widely known about by decision makers. It has a great future though.
Solar and wind are sexy because they represent the pure forms of their type totally fuel-free and environmentally benign power sources. Co-generation is more akin to trading an SUV for a Prius.
On the other hand, it was totally cost-effective vs. a reliability-only investment, works in urban centers (even as just a commercial tenant), and makes a meaningful difference today.
Down the road a little, we may add a limited amount of rooftop solar to cover the now tiny amount of differential in our daytime usage when staff are present (our corporate offices are at the same location). Now that our 24/7 base-load is covered efficiently our remaining peak demand has become something solar actually can be expected to address.
=Smidge=