[Infowarrior] - Google launches a utility as DOE funds data center efficiency

[Richard Forno]

Google launches a utility as DOE funds data center efficiency
With opportunities abounding in renewable power and energy efficiency,  
traditional IT companies are making some rather aggressive moves into  
this market. This week, Google announced that it will launch its own  
utility, while Yahoo has found a source of funds for a new data  
center: the Department of Energy.

By John Timmer | Last updated January 7, 2010 12:33 PM

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/01/google-launches-a-utility-as-doe-funds-datacenter-efficiency.ars
For many traditional IT companies, the lure of energy efficiency  
efforts is two-fold: data center costs are becoming dominated by power  
use, so greater efficiency will both save them money and provide them  
with products and services that they can sell to other companies.  
These efforts also fall nicely in line with the goals of the  
Department of Energy, which is now using some of its stimulus money to  
fund data center efficiency projects from companies like Alcatel- 
Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Yahoo. Meanwhile, Google has decided  
it needs greater control over the power coming in, and will be  
launching its own utility, which will focus on supplying it with  
renewable energy.

The new DOE grants were announced on Wednesday. "By reducing energy  
use and energy costs for the IT and telecommunications industries,  
this funding will help create jobs and ensure the sector remains  
competitive,” stated DOE head Steven Chu.  "The expected growth of  
these industries means that new technologies adopted today will yield  
benefits for many years to come." The total funding was relatively  
small, at $47 million, but (like many DOE-funded efforts), it will  
require matching money from the industry involved, which will bring  
the total expenditures up to over $100 million.

The funding (PDF) will cover the full data center ecosystem, from  
facility cooling to software that helps cut the drain of idle  
hardware. Some of them have gone to traditional enterprise research  
centers. For example, IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center has  
received two awards, one for developing facility-scale liquid cooling,  
the other for monitoring and controlling cooling systems. Alcatel- 
Lucent's Bell Labs will get two as well, for developing methods to  
monitor network-wide traffic flows in order to optimize power use, and  
another for liquid cooling systems, as well.

Hewlett-Packard's award will go towards the development of an  
integrated, modular server unit that integrates the cooling and power  
conversion hardware into the unit. Yahoo will get one to help it build  
one of its passive-cooling data centers, which it described in detail  
in the past.

But some of the more interesting projects are going to smaller  
companies and the academic world. Santa Clara's SeaMicro will be  
testing physicalized servers with hundreds of processors that may see  
a 75 percent energy saving. Caltech will get money to develop software  
for load balancing across multiple data centers. Columbia University  
will be getting an award to develop technology for making better use  
of power once it's on the CPU; the plan is to make better use of the  
power the CPU receives, cutting losses by 10 percent.

Google Energy
Google wasn't on the DOE's award list, but the company has done  
extensive work to optimize the power use of its data centers and  
obtain renewable energy for its facilities. But the company has gone  
significantly beyond that, funding a variety of renewable energy  
technology companies via its Google.org initiative. Apparently,  
however, the company wants a bit more control over the power it uses,  
as the company has launched a subsidiary called Google Energy and  
applied to trade energy on the wholesale market. Essentially, the  
company is dissatisfied with the renewable offerings being made by its  
utilities, and wants to make sure it has more options available to it.

Presumably, the move will ultimately allow it to buy power from some  
of the renewable companies that it's funding via Google.org.

Right now, it's clear that these enterprise companies see lots of  
opportunity in the renewable and energy efficiency markets, and are  
scrambling to take advantage of them (creating some strange bedfellows  
in the process, like the Yahoo-DOE arrangement). But an interview with  
Bill Weihl, the Google executive who runs their green energy  
initiatives, highlights a danger of the current environment: it's  
highly dependent on the stimulus money. "At the end of 2010, when the  
stimulus ends, we’re going to drive off the biggest funding cliff the  
energy field has ever seen," Weihl said. The key question will be  
whether these companies have made an irreversible commitment to  
efficiency before we drop off that cliff.