Green Data Centers: 8 Companies Doing Them Right

Corporate and cloud data centers are a recognized heavy consumer of power, as more and more electronic devices and computers find their way into modern life. Data centers in the US now consume about 2% of the total power produced in the country, the amount of energy having grown 4% from 2010 to 2014, according to a recent study by the US Department of Energy.

US data centers consumed about 70-billion kilowatt hours in 2014 -- which is equivalent to the amount consumed by about 6.4 million average American homes that year, according to the study that was conducted in cooperation with researchers at Stanford, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon universities.

That 4% increase in total data center energy consumption is actually a decrease from the preceding five years, during which total US data center energy consumption grew by 24%.

It represents an even bigger change from the first half of last decade, when that type of energy consumption grew nearly 90%, as data centers became more energy efficient, according to the study. The researchers say they expect the same 4% growth rate between now and 2020.

Even as the industry's energy consumption flattens due in large part to efficiency improvements, data centers may face an additional challenge to become greener, and use electricity generated from sustainable sources. In other words, they must become consumers of electricity produced from hydro, wind, solar, or in other ways than from burning carbon-dioxide generating fuels.

Facebook, Apple, Google, eBay, and Microsoft have pledged to move their new data centers toward all-green operations. At some point, others may be forced to follow. On June 27, the US, Mexico, and Canada pledged that 50% of their electricity generation would come from clean, or non-carbon dioxide-producing sources by 2025.

That pledge may one day find a way to creep into new US regulations or compliance requirements for doing business with the federal government. As an IT manager, how are you going to ensure that your aging, energy-hungry data center isn't going to end up on the wrong side of the law? In New York State, for instance, the Public Utilities Commission has decreed that half of the state's electrical generation will have to come from carbon-free sources by 2030.

[See 7 Cool Data Center Innovations.]

Some of the answers might be simpler than you think. For one, if you're in the Empire State, your company can support New York's recent decision to continue operation of the nuclear power plants within its borders, according to the New York Times on Aug. 1. To do so will cost taxpayers an extra $500 million a year, utility experts estimate. Businesses could on their own initiative describe how green their data centers are by buying green credits derived from the nuclear bill.

Nuclear generation produces 20% of our electricity, but 63% of our carbon-free power. The San Onofre nuclear generating station in California was shut down as an aging facility in 2013, a move that resulted in 11 million tons of carbon being added to the California atmosphere a year, as other sources took over its production, according to the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank advocating the continued use of nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants have their problems, but producing carbon dioxide isn't one of them. Keeping them online after they've become more expensive than coal or gas was deemed justifiable by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office.

Some of the options for running a data center on non-carbon power may prove surprising.

On another front, Google found the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to its data center operations saved 40% in cooling/air conditioning. The DeepMind AI system was able to predict what temperature would be needed over the next hour, based on its machine learning, and the coolers were scaled back to meet that minimum requirement.

In addition to more efficient internal operation, there's simply the option of finding non-coal, oil or natural gas sources of power, such as hydro, wind, solar or tidal power generation. The following are some examples of companies that did just that.

(Cover image: 4X-image/iStockphoto)

Apple's data center in Maiden, N.C., combines two 100-acre solar farms with a multiple fuel-cell electricity generator using bio-gas collected from nearby landfills. Fuel cells can use methane as a chemical feedstock (not a fuel) to generate electricity from a Bloom Energy solid oxide fuel cell. In the process, hydrogen molecules from the methane combine with oxygen from the air, generating an electrical outflow plus water and a small amount of CO2 as byproducts.

A fuel is burned to superheat the air used in the process, but it is much less fuel than that used to generate electricity at a steam generation plant powered by coal, oil, or natural gas. Each solar farm produces 42 million kilowatt hours of electricity, for a total of 84 million KWh from solar, plus 40 million kilowatt hours of energy a year from the Bloom fuel cells. Data Center Knowledge says that's enough to power 10,874 homes.

eBay built a data center in Utah outside Salt Lake City that's tied into the region's electrical grid. Why build a data center there, when the grid is 94% powered by the bituminous coal that's surface-mined in Utah and Wyoming? eBay uses the grid only for backup purposes.

Its data center site is one of the few that is primarily powered by fuel cells of the sort that kept the Apollo spacecraft equipped with energy on its flight to the moon. A bank of 30 Bloom Energy fuel cells function a short distance from its server center, minimizing energy loss in transmission, supplemented by solar panels on the roof of the data center.

Amazon Web Services didn't fare so well when Greenpeace did its May 2015 assessment of how committed the big web companies were to supplying their data centers with electricity from sustainable resources. On one measure, Amazon got an F. But by the end of the year, the company declared it was getting 25% of its electricity from green energy sources. By the end of this year, that total will move to 40%, it said on its sustainability page. But Amazon, the parent company of AWS, hasn't had the luxury of building data centers next to the Arctic Circle, when most of its retail users are located in urban areas, along with its distribution centers.

However, it's starting to get the hang of how to get to green indirectly. It's building three new data centers in suburbs around Columbus. It is also building a wind farm in Paulding County in northwestern Ohio and financing another in Benton County, over the Indiana border. That combination gives Amazon 820,000 megawatt hours of wind-generated power to plug into the Ohio grid and indirectly feed its data and distribution centers in the state. That's won it plaudits from Greenpeace. Amazon now operates a wind farm in North Carolina and a solar farm in Virginia.

On June 12, 2013, Facebook switched on one of the few new data centers built at a source of hydropower in Lulea, in northern Sweden, just below the Arctic Circle. The facility generates 100% of the power it uses from the nearby River Lule as it flows into the Gulf of Bothnia. Facebook said in a blog post that the river's flow is so plentiful and reliable that it has reduced the number of backup generators the company normally keeps on site by more than 70%.

The Lulea facility is built on a scale similar to the first unit of its massive data center to go up in Prineville, Ore. So far, it's operated at a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of 1.07. PUE is a measure of how much electricity is consumed to run the facility, over and above what the compute and network equipment need. Most enterprise data centers have a PUE of 1.8-2.0. A 1.07 rating is among the lowest on record.

When you think about a green data center, it's quite you may have something like Verne Global's Keflavik, Iceland facility in mind. To begin with, Verne Global's location provides full-time ambient air cooling. Next, 100% of the facility's power is generated by geothermal or hydroelectric sources, each of which is defined as a sustainable, green power source.

Verne Global's facility, housed in a former NATO military base, is ISO 27001 (information security) certified and located roughly halfway between Europe and North America. Since Verne Global's green power is also less expensive than the standard power available in many urban centers, companies have been placing computing resources in this Icelandic data center since 2012. While other green data centers have come onto the market, Verne Global is still considered one of the leaders in green power and green operation.

Equinix operates data centers around the world and the company says that it is pursuing green power and operations in all of them. Among the fleet, though, Equinix AM3 Science Park Data Center facility in Amsterdam stands out as a leader in green technology. AM3 is a LEED Gold facility that has a couple of extra tricks available to reduce its environmental footprint.

Equinix built the AM3 facility with Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) alongside hybrid cooling towers to use cool water from the aquifer to chill the hot aisles in the data center. That cool water, after absorbing heat from servers and equipment racks, is used to provide hot water for Amsterdam University -- a win/win that lowers the footprint even more.

You would expect a company named Green House Data to operate green data centers, and so it does, but the greenest of its facilities is the data center at its corporate headquarters in Cheyenne, Wyo. Like many of the data centers that seek to be green today, WY2 makes use of its location to take advantage of ambient cooling to reduce overall energy use.

WY2 has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.14 or lower, placing it in a category of data centers seen as very efficient. Since the PUE is a way of calculating how much of the facility's overall energy use goes into equipment, WY2 is using relatively little of its power for environmental purposes. (The lower the number, the more of the total is taken up by actual processing equipment.) In addition, Green House Data offsets 100% of the energy used at WY2 with renewable wind energy, which takes the data center's operation closer to the magical zero carbon level.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is both a data archive and research center for those studying snow, ice, and climate. The NSIDC is operated by the University of Colorado, and it's supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, NOAA, and other federal agencies. In 2011, management decided that it made little sense for a facility researching climate change to be inefficient. When environmental systems had to be replaced, they were replaced with green options.

Because Boulder exists in a dry climate, new coolers using indirect evaporative cooling were installed. In these, fans blow air over water. That setup saves considerable energy compared to compressors used in traditional air conditioning. Intelligent controls and solar panels that feed both the data center and the power grid add to the NSIDC's green credentials.

Those are our picks for eight of the data centers showing what's possible for green facilities. We know that there are more examples. Which data centers and companies inspire you with the strides they're making in reducing environmental impact? We'd love to hear your picks. Let's get together in the comments to see what we missed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is both a data archive and research center for those studying snow, ice, and climate. The NSIDC is operated by the University of Colorado, and it's supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, NOAA, and other federal agencies. In 2011, management decided that it made little sense for a facility researching climate change to be inefficient. When environmental systems had to be replaced, they were replaced with green options.

Because Boulder exists in a dry climate, new coolers using indirect evaporative cooling were installed. In these, fans blow air over water. That setup saves considerable energy compared to compressors used in traditional air conditioning. Intelligent controls and solar panels that feed both the data center and the power grid add to the NSIDC's green credentials.

Those are our picks for eight of the data centers showing what's possible for green facilities. We know that there are more examples. Which data centers and companies inspire you with the strides they're making in reducing environmental impact? We'd love to hear your picks. Let's get together in the comments to see what we missed.