Renewable Cloud Power Is Focus of New Project

Though New York State is not home to “the windy city,” it is a center for research into harnessing wind power for datacenters.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and Clarkson University are working with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) (NYSE: AMD) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) on software that will enable cloud computing systems to be powered by renewable energy sources with no loss of performance…



As many businesses have discovered advantages to using cloud computing, there has been a huge increase in cloud provider centers. With more datacenters comes more consumption of electricity. Greenpeace, the environmental group, suggests that as much as 2 percent of electricity globally is currently used by datacenters, and that amount is bound to go up at a rate of 12 percent a year.

Steven Kester, a director for AMD, observes that at that rate of growth, we are on track for a collision between demand and supply when it comes to electrical power: "Every time somebody hits on Skype or uses a video conferencing service at the office, they are driving demand at the datacenter. We are trying to arrest that growth and avoid the collision."

While it already is possible to tap into renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, the problem is consistency. There cannot be gaps due to a cloudy day or one in which there is no wind. A datacenter that is prone to go down due to lack of power is useless to businesses that need something they can rely on 24/7. The problem of increasing consumption is noted by Alan Lee, AMD’s corporate vice president of Research and Advanced Development. “Directing power to datacenters from these emerging renewable energy resources without relying on a large-scale, traditional electrical grid is a key challenge,” he says.

The goal of the project launched by AMD, along with its partners, is to find a way to sustain consistent power to datacenters powered completely by wind or solar power. That requires a system that would seamlessly shift from a center that is low on power to one that has an ample supply. “The distributed — or ‘cloud computing’ — network is key to this project,” according to this NYSERDA press release. The data that flows through fiber optic networks can come from anywhere without any noticeable difference to the computer that makes use of it.

A period of 18 months and a sum of $674,000 has been designated for the research efforts at Clarkson University. NYSERDA is providing nearly half that amount, $300,000.

In the first part of the project, university students would run experiments on powering data with solar and wind energy. The hardware comes in at the second phase, with HP’s Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) and processors specially designed “for energy efficiency and cloud computing.” That includes HP’s EcoPOD, which HP boasts is 95 percent more energy efficient than traditional data centers.

NYSERDA sees this project as leading to a much improved state of electrical consumption. According to a recent statement from the organization: “If successful and deployed on a larger scale, this project could bring significant energy savings to an industry that can consume 1 MW of electricity at times of peak operation.”

But don’t expect that to happen in the next two years. The system developed over the course of the research is not expected to be implemented in the real world. It will only break ground in the research that should make it easier for others to follow.