Why Did Facebook Opt For Coal Power?

The always-excellent Economist blogger Babbage posts about Facebook's new Prineville, Oregon, datacenter. Why did Facebook opt for a location where most of its electricity will be generated by coal? Google, for example, built on the Columbia River and has access to cheap, renewable hydropower.
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The answer, apparently, is that Facebook prefers the desert environment of Prineville because it allows ambient outside air to do most of the cooling without the need for energy-hungry air conditioning. The desert air is cool at night and in the winter, of course. But even in the summer, when the air is hot, it is very dry and can be cooled economically with evaporative coolers that spray water through the airstream. (Study up on the reason this works, the high latent heat of water, here.)

Facebook claims a power usage effectiveness of 1.07 at the new facility. Generally corporate datacenters achieve around 2, and Google claims a weighted average PUE of 1.16 for all its datacenters for the 12 months ending in March.

The Babbage post has some additional interesting info about Facebook's datacenter. There is also the Prineville Data Center's Facebook page, of course.

My guess is that their siting evaluation didn't include thinking very much about whether the electricity came from coal or not--either that or they just didn't care. They were willing to emit a lot more carbon to get some economic advantage available from the Prinevile location.

Facebook's next datacenter will be built in Rutherford County, western South Carolina, a location not noted for its desert conditions. (See Charlotte Observer article.) The electricity there will come from Duke Energy. Electricity is cheap there (Google and Apple are also in South Carolina), but much of it comes from coal. According to this Wikipedia article, half of Duke's Carolinas power comes from nuclear. The rest would be from coal and natural gas.

How Much Juice Do Datacenters Use? New Study Says About 1.3% of All Electricity

Datacenters world wide use 1.1-1.5% of all electricity, according to a new study. In the U.S. the figure is 1.7-2.2%. Over the period 2005-2010 global electricity use by datacenters grew by around 56%, and in the U.S. by about 36%. Both global and U.S. electricity use by datacenters had doubled between 2000 and 2005, so this is a significantly slower growth rate over the more recent period.
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The study, carried out by consultant Jonathan Koomey for the New York Times, is described here, where you can also find a link to the pdf. There is also an item about the study in Environmental Leader here.

Datacenter electricity use grew more slowly over the past five years because fewer servers were installed than in the earlier period, both because of the economic recession and due to increased use of virtualization and other energy-saving technologies. And many of the newer servers are serving the cloud, with higher utilization levels.

Even though Google has a large installed base of servers, the study estimates that "Google’s data center electricity use is about 0.01% of total worldwide electricity use and less than 1 percent of global data center electricity use in 2010. This result is in part a function of the higher infrastructure efficiency of Google’s facilities compared to in-house data centers, which is consistent with efficiencies of other cloud computing installations, but it also reflects lower electricity use per server for Google’s highly optimized servers."

The study points out that cloud computing datacenters are more efficient than in-house servers, because they have much higher server utilization levels and much better infrastructure efficiencies. This implies that if computing continues to shift to the cloud the average efficiency of datacenters will continue to increase.

But even with these improved efficiencies, the growth in demand for computing will continue to drive growth in electricity demand for datacenters. Is there any limit to such growth? Can we expect electricity use by datacenters to grow to 2%, then 3%, then 4% of total global generating capacity?

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This is crossposted to the SAP Community Network here.

How Big is the Green Software Market? Expected worth at $5 billion by 2013

The Green software field has been growing for years, but as current estimates have pegged it to more than double in value by 2013, major players in the high tech world are sitting up and taking notice. Chief Sustainability Officers have been added to company boardrooms and corporate sustainability plans can be found on almost all major high tech company websites.

The acquisition of companies providing sustainability related IT (“green data management”) solutions by much larger corporations, such as Clear Standards by SAP in 2009 and NDEVR by Oracle earlier this year, confirms that important companies in the high tech industry are taking note of the booming growth in the Green software market. In fact, the growth rate of the sustainability related software sector is one of the fastest out of all enterprise software markets, far outstripping that of the enterprise software field as a whole, according to estimates made by Forrester and IDC.

With over 100 different resource usage reporting schemes worldwide, many of them government-mandated, businesses have no choice but to deal with the vast amounts of green data they produce on a regular basis. In addition, businesses searching for new ways to cut costs in their operations have noticed that running more resource efficient and less polluting businesses is a good way to save money and please stakeholders. All these factors have contributed to the expansion of the green data management sector, currently estimated at $2 billion, but expected to grow to $4.8 billion as soon as 2013 by Forrester Research.

With the growth of stakeholder interest in corporate sustainability, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make their green data public and prove that they are taking efforts to become more sustainable. Requests from stakeholders for green data have become almost as frequent as those for financial data, and it is crucial that companies present this data and their sustainability goals in a way that demonstrates the importance with which they regard sustainability. The value that stakeholders have been placing on being environmentally friendly has helped the green data management market grow to the multi-billion dollar industry it is today, and will only fuel its growth in the future.

Among all the products and services offered in this sector are resource (often, specifically carbon) management tools. Many companies in the IT field have expanded their service offerings to include management and reporting programs, and these tools have become very popular with executives of larger, multi-national corporations, who use them to manage their green data and create corporate sustainability plans across their branches.

In addition to carbon accounting products, many companies in this sector provide other sustainability related products and services, many of which are GRC (government, risk, and compliance) focused. These include: operational risk management products (to help companies comply with safety regulations) and products to assess workforce and supply chain sustainability. Overall, the value of all these products and services can add up, as it did for large enterprise software company SAP. In fact, the value of all SAP’s sustainability related products sold in 2010 was estimated to be in the triple digit million euros range, making the GRC product sector one of their fastest growing.

Whether it is to cut costs, please stakeholders, or to report to the government, companies everywhere are increasingly finding the need to use green data management software, leading to the sky-rocketing growth in this industry. It is clear that in the next couple decades, the sustainability related software market will be one to keep an eye out for, as it begins to play a more important role in the enterprise software market as a whole. In fact, it might be advantageous for companies already in the enterprise software line of business to begin looking into green data management solutions, as there is a good chance that this sector will become the future of the enterprise software market. - Maanya Condamoor

Maanya Condamoor is a former Green Data Intern at KloudData Inc. and an undergraduate student at UCLA

For Further Reading:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-17/sap-corners-11-billion-green-software-market-takes-on-ibm.html

http://www.environmentalleader.com/2010/07/01/carbon-management-software-market-to-grow-33/?graph=full&id=1

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Green-IT/Green-IT-Service-Market-to-Grow-to-48-Billion-in-2013-Forrester-587606/

http://www.thegreenitreview.com/2011/06/carbon-management-software-and-services.html

http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/news/2240038891/Energy-carbon-management-apps-offer-new-twist-on-enterprise-software

http://crmsearch.com/enterprise-software-market.php