Michael Kanellos
Will Computers Kill the Benefits of Going Solar? August 14, 2008 at 8:57 AM
Nearly everyone in the U.S. it seems wants to see more solar power facilities put into the ground, but getting to the point where solar actually makes a dent in the consumption of traditional electricity is getting tougher and tougher.
Take this factoid from Spansion CEO Bertrand Cambou. According to Cambou, the data centers in the U.S. consume twice as much power as the collective solar footprint produces in the country. The overall solar footprint is expanding daily of course, but so is the number of computers. In Northern California, data centers gobble of 2.5 percent of the electricity and the figure is growing, Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager at PG&E, told me. If you think about it, growth in computing is more inevitable and predictable: demand doesn’t depend on tax credits.
Thus, we appear to be in a situation where solar can limit the growth of greenhouse gases, but not reverse it. Unless, of course, U.S. consumers and utilities begin to concentrate more on that all-important but dull topic: energy efficiency. Buy products that do more on less power. Utility executives and national laboratory scientists talk about how efficiency needs to be the primary goal in the U.S. but it is taking time to sink in. It’s just not as cool as a biodiesel car.
Energy efficiency, though, is a message you will hear a lot in the next decade from chip companies like Spansion. Spansion wants to replace DRAM, the memory inside most servers, with a type of flash called EcoRAM the company will come out with in the fourth quarter. In a hypothetical, Spansion says that a data center based around the company’s flash costs 1/4th as much to operate, takes up 1/4th of the floor space and costs less than half of a traditional one because the chips use far less power and there is less need for air conditioning. (You can save even more by putting in flash-based hard drives, which Intel starts to sell in the fourth quarter. Most flash execs are skeptical about EcoRAM and selling flash drives instead, but, hey, if Spansion can pull it off, all power to them.)
And if you put it in today’s servers? The data centers in the U.S. would only consume half of the energy coming from the country’s solar panels, he said.
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Ridiculous article. Comparing today’s expensive installed solar base to computer growth is not a “factoid” any sensible person would waste time pointing out.
Thin film PV can be installed at less than 1/2 the price of the current installed solar base. As less expensive V comes to market from FSLR, AMAT plants, Nanosolar and others the installed solar base growth will explode.
People hope. It’s still going to be subsidized.
also, the footprint is a big deal. It takes a long time to get solar in the ground. Takes almost no time to buy more servers.
I don’t get the connection between datacenter energy use and solar. They have nothing to do with each other. Datacenter energy use is going to go up (or down) no matter how much solar costs. Solar still helps by providing a non-carbon producing source of electricity.
Is this article meant to depress us?
Until data centers start rolling out their cages to the great outdoors and slapping solar panels on their server racks – no direct connection.
But I think what Michael is referring to is the statistical comparison. Solar is ‘a big deal’ but still only provides half the power data centers consume. While solar may have great potential for exponential growth, the growth in data center power consumption is reliable and easy to predict due to the factors that contribute to it (processing cores, memory demand, etc)
The point is that the growing energy demands of data centers may far outweigh the impact solar has on the energy problem. Must be why data centers are parked next to hydroelectric plants and sources of geothermal power instead of putting solar panels on their roof.
Michael hints at something larger too. Energy innovations like solar may not keep pace with energy demand. So we have to reduce the number of servers and the energy consumption of each one or grow the capacity of existing datacenters with out increasing power if we are to dodge troubling predictions of incredibly large power bills.
Enter Spansion EcoRAM
Jan Silverman vice president Media Storage Division for Spansion