“We are making electricity from a free fuel and not using a fossil fuel,” Michael Newell said this week in an interview with TriplePundit. “Every kilowatt you are generating from our system is a kilowatt you don’t need from fossil fuels.”

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Yesterday, IST Energy released the world’s first compact, mobile waste-to energy system: the GEM (Green Energy Machine). The slick-looking device converts trash into pellets that are in turn converted into electricity and gas heat. 95 percent of daily consumer waste can be dumped into the machine, including paper, plastic, wood, food, and agricultural materials.

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Somehow this doesn’t surprise me. Vintners are acutely aware of the health of their environment, their plants, and the resulting product. With the refined and particular tastes of many of their consumers, a lackluster wine will lead to lackluster profits. Beyond that though, their customers are, I would venture to guess, more likely to be of the LOHAS mindset, choosing what they consume based on more factors then simply the cheapest available. They want everything they touch to have thought, consciousness, and a lighter impact on the planet factored into them.

How can a wine be green? The grapes themselves can of course be organic, the growing method biodynamic. But what else?

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It is estimated that the data storage sector consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5% of total U.S. consumption, or roughly equivalent to the amount consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households). These numbers are only expected to grow.

The energy used by the nation’s servers and data centers is growing at an unsustainable rate. Not only that, but web servers are notoriously inefficient. For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities operate at roughly 65% to 75% efficiency, meaning that 25% to 35% of all the energy consumed by servers is wasted (converted to heat).

If we are to even consider reducing our energy consumption and carbon footprint, the growing demands generated by our web servers must be near the top of the list of possible improvements. And the Department of Energy agrees.

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“Quartz rocks placed in electric-arc furnaces exude oxygen as superheated gas, leaving molten silicon. Just venting all that heat without setting something afire is a concern.” — Jon Van, Chicago Tribune

Now a company has found a way to make money capturing and using that heat, to make steam to run electrical generators. Illinois company Recycled Energy Development LLC, or RED, announced it has closed a deal with West Virginia Alloys, a silicon making subsidiary of Globe Metallurgical, Inc. The deal allows West Virginia Alloys to lock in a price for its electricity for 25 years; since that’s their largest cost of doing business, they’re happy. And since West Virginia’s electricity comes from burning coal, the state is pretty happy about having a way to help offset the millions of tons of greenhouse gases produced there. RED is getting big money from a deal made with Denham Capital Management, a private equity firm fueled by $1.5Billion from Bill Gates and Harvard University.

AC-DC?

For electricity flowing all the way from power plants to the wall socket, alternating current is far superior. But for the short transmissions inside those computers DC power prevails. The search for ways to convert AC to DC more efficiently is leading some data center companies to consider a DC-centric approach.

It’s easier to transmit AC over long distances; DC requires thick copper cables or bars, instead of comparatively lightweight wires. But DC becomes a more serious possibility for power once AC reaches a building.

Converting from one form of power to another in a computing environment may not be performed efficiently, especially at the server level, and even then, the resulting waste heat may be deposited in the rack or computer room at a point that requires further effort to dispose of it with the air handlers. Unfortunately, there is disagreement in the community over how to address these inefficiencies.

• DC advocates argue that plugging servers into AC power is inefficient, and switching systems to DC would cut down on waste heat and component failure.
• Proponents argue that using DC outside the server removes some of the inefficiencies of power supplies that convert AC electricity to DC. Servers without such power supplies don’t have to contend with as much waste heat and attendant component failure.

But according to NPPL, substituting DC power in data centers as a replacement for conventional AC power has not yet made significant inroads into many data centers because the technology is unfamiliar to many facility engineers.

Despite the wide-spread use of DC power in telecommunications, there is reluctance within the computer industry to switch to new technologies without field experience showing that the switch could be done safely and would have operational and economic benefits without causing unanticipated problems.

If DC would in fact be a more efficient type of power within servers themselves, might it be possible to site server farms to take advantage of the DC provided by integrated renewable energy generating systems such as solar PV and wind?

Photos:1.© Eimantas Buzas | Dreamstime.com; 2. Versageek via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

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