MMA Renewable Ventures finances energy efficiency
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Blog: Project financing for energy project is helping fuel renewable energy adoption. MMA Renewable Ventures expands financing to energy efficiency for midsize companies.
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Neah Power Systems, which develops fuel cells for notebooks, raises $12 million in venture funding.
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(InfoWorld) - The IT industry's thirst for energy is growing exponentially, far outpacing the supply of reliable, clean power. Now a group of leading IT firms has banded together to try to head off an impending energy crisis in the datacenter. Eleven enterprise heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel, AMD, Rackable Systems, and VMWare announced Monday that they have formed a non-profit group called The Green Grid to drive new metrics, technology standards, and best practices for curbing power consumption. Robust growth in the IT sector and in companies' use of technology is leading to an acute power shortage, according to analyst firm Gartner. Half the worldâs datacenters will run out of power by the end of 2008, Gartner estimates. That means companies face swelling utility bills as they struggle to keep their servers cool and humming. Many of the companies participating in The Green Grid are individually developing energy-efficient technologies. However, joining forces to tackle the power-consumption problem holistically is a must, according to Green Grid board member Bruce Shaw, director of worldwide commercial and enterprise marketing at AMD. "No one player owns the kingdom. It's not just a processor problem. It's not just a server problem. It's not just a memory problem. Everyone in the ecosystem needs to be involved." By working together, Green Grid companies can develop ways for their respective greener technologies to "hook into one another," thus increasing their overall effectiveness, Shaw said. The consortium started work last April, with representatives for AMD, Sun, IBM, and HP getting the ball rolling. Not surprisingly, there have been challenges from the out start, including concerns about intellectual property and developing a standard way to measure power consumption   "Do you measure by performance per watt? Per dollar? Per thread? Something different?" said Green Grid boar member Colette LaForce, vice president of marketing at Rackable Systems.Â
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Blog: Money is pouring into clean tech start-ups but recent reports examine longer-term issues.
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Want to get some VC funds? Come up with a cool energy-storage concept like the flow battery from Deeya Energy.
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This energy powerhouse looks cheap, despite recent setbacks.
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Investors, corporations are warming to the idea that there's money in being green.
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Richard Branson of Virgin plans to invest in efforts to find renewable, sustainable energy sources.
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Two real estate firms announced yesterday that they had committed to purchasing credits for power generated from wind farms to cover the energy needs of their joint headquarters in Bethesda and an office building in downtown Washington.
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(InfoWorld) - Computer maker Dell's solution to the datacenter energy crisis is to market more energy-efficient versions of its PowerEdge line of servers. Dell is scheduled to introduce on Monday the PowerEdge Energy Smart model 1950 and 2950 servers, which the company claims deliver a 25 percent improvement in performance per watt compared to the standard 1950 and 2950. The announcement follows Dell's September launch of Energy Smart OptiPlex business desktop computers. The Energy Smart server features include a processor that draws only 40 watts of power versus the 65 watts or 80 watts drawn in standard servers. Energy Smart servers will also offer only 2.5-inch disk drives, smaller than the typical 3.5-inch drives. Those design changes may diminish performance in a way some customers would find unacceptable, said Jay Parker, director of PowerEdge Servers in the Dell Product Group. But for others, the goal is energy efficiency. "We would expect somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range of our customers to be interested in this product and to ultimately migrate to this. But there is a whole other set of customers who need more configurability or [for whom] power efficiency is not a priority," Parker said. The Energy Smart servers also feature redesigned power supplies and cooling fans, as well as software that regulates the processors and memory to power the server up and down as computing demand changes. Vendors of servers, desktops, and other enterprise hardware are on anÂ energy-saving kickÂ these days, addressing the need to cut datacenter power consumption. The lifetime operating cost of powering servers and cooling them with air conditioning is becoming more of a concern to datacenter managers than the price of the server itself. Hewlett-Packard unveiledÂ on Nov. 28 what it calls "Dynamic Smart Cooling" for datacenters. Heat sensors on server racks send signals to a control panel that adjusts the air-conditioning output. HP's technology doesn't address the energy problem as directly as Dell does by making the server energy-efficient, Parker said. "You have to optimize the server, because ultimately that has a huge ripple effect on the other infrastructure pieces in the datacenter. In our mind [HP's technology] seems to ignoreÂ the first obvious step, which is to address the server itself," he said. Pricing for the Energy Smart 1950 starts at $2,449, $100 more than the standard 1950, Parker said. Pricing for the Energy Smart 2950 starts at $2,619.
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A leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist sees gold in alternative energy.
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(InfoWorld) - A group of some of the biggest technology companies said they've committed to a plan to improve the power efficiency of equipment they make and use. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative , which includes companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., aims to improve the efficiency of power sources for computers and servers and encourage end users to take advantage of underused power management techniques. Only about 50 percent of the power that leaves a power outlet reaches a PC, because inefficient power cords leak energy, Google's Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Holzle said Tuesday during a press conference to announce the program. Climate Savers has defined a series of standards for power supply efficiency in servers and PCs that it suggests members adopt between now and July 2010. By 2010, the Climate Savers standard will define a power supply that is above 95 percent efficient, Holzle said. The program asks manufacturing members to build products to the standard and companies to pledge to buy products that have the improved power supplies. The improvement doesn't require the development of new technologies. "This is all do-able today with technology we have and know," Holzle said. The reason that vendors haven't deployed such efficient power cords is because they cost more, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group. A PC with a more efficient power cord would cost around US$20 more and a server an additional $30, he said. To address that price premium, Climate Savers is encouraging energy companies to issue rebates to users that buy products with the more efficient power supplies. Over time that cost premium is expected to drop with volume production, Gelsinger said. In addition, end users will save on their energy bills, also helping to offset the cost, he noted. Another component of Climate Savers is general education and encouragement for end users to take advantage of power management mechanisms that are typically built into existing PCs. "Ninety percent of PCs are capable but aren't utilizing power management techniques," Gelsinger said. "We want to drive IT policy in enterprises," he said. Improving power supply efficiencies and the use of power management techniques along the timeline Climate Savers has described would reduce global carbon emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year. It would save 62 billion kilowatt hours of energy in 2010, worth around $5.5 billion in energy costs, the group said. In its own data centers, most of Google's servers already have power supplies that comply with the Climate Savers standards for 2008 and 2009, Holzle said. Google began investing in the more expensive supplies because "it's worth spending a bit more on the power supply to save on the energy bill," he said. He defended Google's overall carbon footprint, despite questions about company jets that are hard on the environment. He pointed to the solar power used at the company's headquarters and incentives for employees to buy hybrid cars. In addition, he hinted at future energy-saving programs that the company plans to announce soon. Although Holzle said he knows Google's carbon footprint, he declined to share it. Other companies that are already part of the program include Yahoo Inc., Hitachi Ltd., eBay Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., NEC Corp., Red Hat Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Unisys Corp. and the Linux Foundation.
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The company's "Energy Smart" products are aimed at customers sensitive to energy costs.
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"We have our own clean tech fund here," says GE's vice president of ecomagination program.
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A push into the solar sector could benefit the company.
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Blog: Energy efficiency technology to manage peak demand attracts more clean tech investment.
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Two Silicon Valley firms show energy-efficient practicies in their own facilities.