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1. Green:Net Panel: Greening the Data Center
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2. Green:Net: The New Networked Car
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3. Green:Net: Saul Griffith on the Reality of Carbon Responsibility
Green:Net Panel: Greening the Data Center
Stacey Higginbotham - Energy
Albert Esser, V-P at Dell, trumpeted the computer giant’s ability to become carbon-neutral and explained that it’s difficult to become green, but it will improve your bottom line by saving on costs. Esser’s focus was on increasing utilization to lower electricity demand. He said newer facilities are 40 percent more efficient but if a company focuses on its utilization of servers, they can increase efficiency by more than 200 percent. Rich Lechner, V-P of Energy and Environment at IBM, echoed the focus on utilization, both internally and also with IBM customers, for which IBM builds data centers. He also took it a step further and encouraged virtualizaiton of networking, storage and desktops.
Better utilization of IT assets and end devices are also an important component of energy consumption that IT can manage, stressed the panelists. Robert Aldrich, senior manager and principle of energy-efficient solutions at Cisco, said the networking company spent $150 million last year on power and hopes to cut that by 20 percent in part through better management of end devices.
Aside from utilization, panelists debated the role that renewables should play in a data center. Christina Page, director climate and energy strategy at Yahoo, touted free air cooling as a way to reduce costs associated with data centers and said companies should focus more on reduction in energy demand rather than using clean power. Esser disagreed, pointing out that as a consumer of several megawatts of power, data center operators can galvanize a local utility to switch to renewables by acting as a guaranteed customer for it.
Green:Net: The New Networked Car
Liz Gannes - Automotive
The networked car requires a complete inversion of the way we think about owning and operating a vehicle. A viable infrastructure for widespread electric car adoption doesn’t come along by just swapping in some plug-ins at your neighborhood dealership. But if this world were to come true — and through companies like Better Place and Coulomb Technologies, it already is — it would be a magical place.
“We’re talking about two industries that have never had to work together before — that’s the auto industry and the utilities, the grid operators,” said Rolf Schreiber, RechargeIT Engineer from Google. Panelists agreed that standardization is of utmost importance. Plug-in stations need to be interoperable. Customers of one company need to be able to roam onto another’s grid. Electrical interfaces need to sync. Utilities need to make charging cheap and efficient.
“Let’s make the vehicles talk,” said Sven Thesen of Better Place. “Standards work is not complex; it’s tedious and has to be done. The big picture is the technology is there; we don’t need to reinvent, we just need to put it in a different order. We’re talking about slow-moving old industries where change comes slowly.”
The panelists also had one more tiny request — international governmental help. They want federal loans and guarantees on batteries, subsidies for plug-in stations and regulations as added motivation.
It’s a lot to ask, yes. But folks at this conference are thinking big.
Green:Net: Saul Griffith on the Reality of Carbon Responsibility
Liz Gannes - Carbon Markets
Saul Griffith was the bearer of bad news at our Green:Net conference today. A nicer way to put it would be to say he gave us a reality check — and you have to admit his pretty charts and loads of data were tremendously informative and practical. I’d recommend checking out the video when it comes out.
If you look at the world’s capability to produce energy, there are some pretty big mismatches, Griffith pointed out. Even taking all of the wave energy of every wave in the world would amount to only one-fifth or sixth of humanity’s power needs, he said. Whereas there’s 85,000 TW of surface solar potential and 3,600 TW of winds.
Griffith’s target is 12 TW in renewable carbon energy by 2033. But to get to that total would require immense and immediate effort, including:
- starting tomorrow, 100 meters squared of solar cells would have to be produced every second for the next 25 years.
- also 50 meters squared of solar thermal meters
- 13 -megawatt wind turbine installed every 25 minutes for next 25 years
- 1 full-scale nuclear power plant every week for the next 25 years
- 300 MW worth of steam turbines every day
- 1250 meters squared of algae every second for the next 25 years
Griffith: “That should scare you. But it’s possible.”
He calls this massive hypothetical energy production place “Renewistan” — “a country that doesn’t exist yet, but I hope to be king of.”
On a personal level, Griffith proposed that the current recession could jump-start a decline from a peak of individual energy use in 2008. It takes 67 pounds of oil, 63 pounds of coal, and 12 pounds of gas to produce the 11,400 watts per day Americans use. Meeting the world average of 2255 watts per day would require a humongous lifestyle change, but there’s a lot of things that can be tweaked, like video conferencing in lieu of flying.
With only a smidgen of an attempt to end on a high note, Griffith closed with earlier speaker Jonathan Koomey’s equation for the state of the world’s carbon. “There’s a known and reasonably predictable amount of carbon we can burn before it’s all over.”
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