Google's New Data Center in Finland Enhances Efficient Energy Plan
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Abandoned Finland Mill Goes Google Digital
For Data Center, Google Goes for the Cold WSJ
Unlike America’s tea party members, AOC doesn’t throw off the success stories of the Scandinavian economies as a bunch of lies by socialist communists. We believe Scandinavia has much to teach us about definitions of success and human wellbeing in the modern world.
God didn’t have much to do with Google’s decision to open a $273 million server in Hamina, Finland over the weekend. If you believe in goddesses, then perhaps Mother Nature was operating in Findland’s favor, with its cold climate. As for low electricity prices, she was not involved to the best of our knowledge.
Google’s new data center is located in an old paper ill on the Baltic coast of Finland. The move to digital and the strong environmental ethic in Scandinavia had a major effect on demand in the paper industry. When paper manufacturer Stora Enso Oyj closed down the mill in 2008, Google seized the opportunity to retrofit the strucuture as a new data center.
“When building a data center, there are a whole bunch of cost items involved. These include the cost of land, the actual building and the server equipment. But what has been the main focal point in recent years is the cost of cooling servers,” says Al Verney, a spokesman at Google Benelux.
Data centers now account for 1.5% of the world’s energy usage. Internet traffic is expected to increase four-fold in the next five years.
Google Green
Googles Voluminous and Efficient Energy Consumption
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/09/09/story-behind-googles-huge-appetite-energy?page=0%2C1
Google’s Vice President of Technical Infrastructure recently blogged news regarding the massive amount of energy they consume and how efficient they are in using it. The blog followed up on an earlier report about how using gmail as opposed to other e-mail services is 80 times less carbon-intensive because of the efficiencies Google has in place.
Google uses 2.6 million megawatt-hours of electricity, or enough to power 200,000 homes - .01% of the world’s energy use.
Google defends this use and assures us that they are very focused on energy efficiency and passing that along to their consumers.
For example, watching 72 hours of YouTube has the same carbon footprint as the entire lifecycle of a DVD — which, unless you’re watching one of the Lord of the Rings DVDs one time, or watching any other video many, many times, means streaming video is a net positive.
Similarly, a year’s worth of Gmail usage has a smaller carbon footprint than the entire lifecycle of a bottle of wine — from growing the grapes to drinking the wine to, as Bill Wiehl, Google’s Energy Czar, explained in an interview today, sending off a message in the now-empty bottle.
Additionally Wiehl responded when queried, “The simple answer is that we’ve been concerned for a long time about competitive advantage in certain areas and providing details on our energy consumption might compromise us in some ways. We’ve always wanted to balance our concern with our desire to be transparent. And we’ve matured a lot over the last 13-plus years — and the industry has too — and now it’s more important to share information about it to encourage dialogue and action about corporate sustainability.”
Dig deeper on Google Green.
ClearEdge Power
Fuel-Cell Startup Clear Edge Scores $73.5 Millioin From Investors Forbes
ClearEdge Power, a Hillsboro, Ore., startup that makes small-scale fuel cells, has raised $73.5 million in one of the bigger green tech funding rounds of the year.
ClearEdge is modeled after Bloom Energy, a Silicon Valley startup producing mega-energy in its Bloom boxes, which have been sold to major corporations like Google, Wal-Mart, Adobe and eBay for $700,000 or more.
If Bloom’s stylish polished metal cubes, which look like something Steve Jobs would have designed, are the iPhones of fuel cells, ClearEdge’s 5-kilowatt, equally stylish white boxes are the iPod nanos.
The ClearEdge5 fuel cell sells for $56,000 before state and federal tax breaks, with a $10,000 or so installation fee. At 5-kilowatts, a single ClearEdge fuel cell produces the equivalent amount of electricity of a large residential solar panel array at peak output. But unlike solar panels, a fuel cell operates 24/7.
Environmentalists complain that the fuel-cell startups will depress solar-panel demand.
Bloom Box
Bloom energy Reveals Impressive Clients & Existing Functionality
Let’s Hope Bloom Energy’s ‘Bloom Box’ Is Bathed In Good Karma & Kilowatts of Clean Energy
