Forty Shades of Green

posted by Daniel Costello on May 16, 2007

Back home in Ireland we have a saying that no matter which direction you look you’re bound to see “Forty Shades of Green.” Famous for its rolling green hills, rich farmland and lush pastures Ireland continues to live up to the idiom.

While “efficiency” was the buzzword for 2006, “green” is where the buzz is heading in 2007. But what is green?

Is a Hybrid car really green? It still burns fossil fuels, emits carbon monoxides into the atmosphere and adds to the greenhouse effect. Is solar energy really green? It costs energy to produce Photovoltaic cells and the payback can be longer that expected. The exact EROI for photovoltaic cells is a topic of much debate and government subsidies to install solar power systems complicates the equation. The EROI and environmental impact to build Hybrid cars may make them far from green. California is the biggest producer of Geothermal energy but only 0.36% of the total energy produced in America. Geothermal produces very low to zero emissions. Wave power is gaining momentum in Europe with installations in Portugal and Scotland in place. Wind energy has been around for millennia and is gaining market share with the US installing 3000 MW of new capacity this year alone. There is an obvious need for everyone, particularly industry, to focus on more energy efficient manufacturing and operations.

I am responsible for Data Center Engineering in Intel IT. Data centers are at the top of the buzz list for 2007 and I imagine they will be the talk of the industry for years to come. There is a newly proposed metric to measure the efficiency of a data center called the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and is just one positive, first step toward building greener data centers.

PUE is simple: Total Facility Power/Total IT Equipment Power. For a PUE of 2 there would be 1 Watt supplied to the IT load for 1 Watt to power and cool that same load. It can also be converted into a % called DCE which is simply 1/PUE. The industry average PUE for data centers is between 2 and 3. At the high end it takes 2x as much energy to power and cool the systems that provide the IT resources. Certainly not green. We are discovering as we build high density compute centers to support our internal product development we can lower the PUE to significantly less. Our goal is to get to an annual average of 1.5 compared to our traditional data centers with a PUE of 2, which is being conservative. That is a power savings of 25%.

What is the world spending on Data Center power? Reports suggest data center energy spending is at approx $7 billion per year. A twenty-five percent savings is a large chunk of $7B and although, not completely green, certainly greener. We have limited resources on the planet and a culture behaving as if we had unlimited resources. We will always struggle, maybe never achieving a true green. Can we afford to leave energy adaptation until all the resources are gone? Perhaps before that day market forces and necessity will drive us to become more creative about our long term energy consumption. Shouldn’t every industry have a PUE metric before then? We need to plan ahead and get more from what we’ve got. Not just because it costs less or gives us a competitive advantage, but because we recognize the resources are limited. Just like in Ireland, no matter which direction we look in for future industries, we should see some shade of green.

So next Saint Patrick’s Day get on your green and think about what it really means because everyone is green, ahem I mean Irish, on Paddy’s day.

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tagged: Data Center, efficiency, energy efficient, green, server