Salon has another example of tech companies investing in renewable energy to power their data centres - Microsoft invests in Texas wind power project.

How important can it be when giant companies that consume vast amounts of energy commit to buying renewables?

Well, the 110-megawatt Keechi wind power project in Texas, which Microsoft on Monday said it would get behind through a power purchase agreement, “would not have happened otherwise,” according to Susan Reilly, president and CEO of project developer RES Americas.

This is an interesting project for a variety of reasons. First, for the Microsofties it moves them beyond greening their energy profile through the purchase of renewable energy credits, according to company chief environmental strategist Rob Bernard, “to actually investing directly in green energy.”

CNet has a follow up to the recent story about a wave power driven data centre for Google - Google could have a floating data center in Maine, too.

As CNET reported Friday, it looks very much like Google has been building a floating data center made from shipping containers on a barge in the middle of San Francisco Bay. But it may not be the only one of its kind.

Google has not responded to multiple requests for comment. But the project in San Francisco Bay appears likely to be the manifestation of a 2009 patent for a "water-based data center," and would likely leverage the fact that wave energy can provide cheap and plentiful power.

Now it seems as though Google may well have built a sister version of the project, and, according to the Portland Press Herald, it recently showed up in the harbor in Portland, Maine.

Wired has a look at the slow greening of data centres last year - 2011: The Year Data Centers Turned Green.

The amount of data the world stores is on an explosive growth curve. According to research outfit IDC, the digital universe will grow 44 times larger over the course of the decade, thanks to the rise of worldwide obsessions with things like social media and cloud computing. And that means more data centers.

But this data center boom comes at a time of high energy prices and heightened concern about carbon emissions. The days of cramming truck loads of servers into a room and firing up a bunch of industrial air-conditioners to cool them are over.

Data center operators are gaining control of their energy bills and earning green points by increasing data center efficiency, from server processor chips to warehouse-size buildings. There’s no how-to manual on building green data centers. The industry is feeling its way on energy efficiency — and no two data centers are alike.

Out of necessity, the huge Internet players — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Yahoo, and Apple — are finding ways to use greener energy and get more out of the energy they use. Google has continued to earn praise for its energy and environmental practices, and Facebook is actually sharing its progress with the rest of the world. This year, it launched the Open Compute Project, encouraging the rest of the industry to exchange technologies and techniques for building efficient data centers.

2011 was a banner year for green data centers, with dozens of state-of-the-art facilities opening for business. Here, Wired takes a look at nine of the more innovative facilities that came online in 2011, rating each by Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE), the industry standard measure of a facility’s energy-efficiency. PUE is ratio of all electricity a facility consumes to electricity used by the IT equipment it houses.

The ideal — 1.0 — means a facility’s lighting, power, and cooling systems consume no power and its power distribution system is perfectly efficient. Most data centers are in the 2.0 to 3.0 range, meaning ancillary systems and losses consume as much or more energy than the electricity used to run the servers, but the cream of crop have PUE ratings well below this range.

Technology Review has an article noting "Far-flung data centers could use otherwise unharvestable renewable energy for computation" - Really Remote Data.

Researchers at Cambridge University want to put data centers in places so remote they aren't on any power grid. Their models indicate that moving data-hungry computation to places such as scorching deserts, windswept peaks, and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—all rich in sunlight and wind energy—could allow this otherwise unharvestable energy to do useful work.

In a paper to be delivered at the 13th annual HotOS conference in May, the authors offer an extreme model of how cloud services could incorporate remote data centers powered only by renewable energy. Their scenario sites one solar- and wind-powered data center in the desert of southwest Australia and a second one in Egypt, on other side of the planet. This placement is no accident: putting them in different hemispheres, on opposite sides of the earth, maximizes the solar and wind energy they can harvest.

One catalyst for such a radical rethinking of how data centers can be sited and powered is the increasing availability of advanced fiber-optic networks. Connecting a remote renewable-energy plant to a power grid remains prohibitively expensive, reasoned the researchers working on this project—Sherif Akoush, Ripduman Sohan, Andrew Rice, Andrew W. Moore, and Andy Hopper—but running fiber-optic cable to such a plant would be relatively easy and cheap.

"We envisage data centers being put in places where renewable energy is being produced and you could never economically bring it back to heat a house," says Andy Hopper, senior author on the paper and head of Cambridge University's computer science department. "But you could lay a fiber and use energy that is otherwise lost, in that it's not economically transportable." One way to think of the underlying principle, he notes, is that it's easier to move bits (made up of photons) than electrons. ...

Hopper, however, points out that the larger effort of which this paper is a part—the Computing for the Future of the Planet project—takes it as a given that more computing is always good, because the virtualization of goods and services displaces more energy-intensive activities in the physical world. He says that a system like the one he proposes would be implemented only at either "no cost to overall performance [of a cloud computing system] or at an attractive cost to performance."

Technology Review has an article on new solid-state power-management devices which "will charge cars fast and make the power grid more flexible and efficient" - A Way to Make the Smart Grid Smarter.

New semiconductor-based devices for managing power on the grid could make the "smart grid" even smarter. They would allow electric vehicles to be charged fast and let utilities incorporate large amounts of solar and wind power without blackouts or power surges. These devices are being developed by a number of groups, including those that recently received funding from the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) and the National Science Foundation.

As utilities start to roll out the smart grid, they are focused on gathering information, such as up-to-the-minute measurements of electricity use from smart meters installed at homes and businesses. But as the smart grid progresses, they'll be adding devices, such as smart solid-state transformers, that will strengthen their control over how power flows through their lines, says Alex Huang, director of a National Research Foundation research center that's developing such devices. "If smart meters are the brains of the smart grid," he says, "devices such as solid-state transformers are the muscle." These devices could help change the grid from a system in which power flows just one way—from the power station to consumers—to one in which homeowners and businesses commonly produce power as well.

Today's transformers are single-function devices. They change the voltage of electricity from one level to another, such as stepping it down from the high voltages at which power is distributed to the 120- and 240-volt levels used in homes. The new solid-state transformers are much more flexible. They use transistors and diodes and other semiconductor-based devices that, unlike the transistors used in computer chips, are engineered to handle high power levels and very fast switching. In response to signals from a utility or a home, they can change the voltage and other characteristics of the power they produce. They can put out either AC or DC power, or take in AC and DC power from wind turbines and solar panels and change the frequency and voltage to what's needed for the grid. They have processors and communications hardware built in, allowing them to communicate with utility operators, other smart transformers, and consumers.

The devices are so flexible that researchers are still working out how to make the best use of them. There are several possibilities. Today, charging an electric vehicle at home takes many hours, even if it's plugged into a special charger with 220/240-volt circuits rather than more common 110/120-volt outlets. Direct-current chargers can cut the time for charging a 24-kilowatt-hour pack like the one in the new Nissan Leaf from eight hours to just 30 minutes, but they're inefficient, wasting about 10 to 12 percent of the power that comes in to them. The new transformers could replace these special chargers, and they're more efficient, wasting only about 4 percent of the power, says Arindam Maitra, a senior project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, which is developing smart transformers.

What's more, because the transformers have communications and processing capability, if several neighbors plug in their cars to charge at the same time, the transformers can prevent circuits from being overloaded by slowing or postponing charging based on consumer preferences and price signals from the utility. The same devices can also be used to send DC power from solar panels to the grid, eliminating the need for some equipment currently used to convert the power from solar panels and leveling out fluctuations in their voltage that could otherwise cause the panels to trip off and stop producing electricity.

As power consumers such as big-box stores start to install more solar panels and energy-storage devices, smart transformers could be key to integrating power from these sources and the grid, Maitra says. Storage systems and distributed energy can allow stores to decide when to draw power from the grid and when to send power back to it, depending on the price of electricity at a given moment. Smart transformers could coordinate this potentially rapid change from buying to selling power, while keeping the grid stable and preventing neighbors' lights from dimming. They could even allow people to buy electricity from their neighbors, Huang says. "If you plug in your electric car at night, you could charge it by negotiating with those in your neighborhood who have excess power," he says. "You actually pay him. You don't pay the utility."

Other kinds of devices can do many of the same things, but the idea of coordinating a large number and variety of consumer-owned devices makes utilities nervous about their ability to keep the grid stable. The new transformers would simplify the system and be utility-owned, making it easier for grid operators to keep the lights on, Maitra says.

Another potential benefit of smart transformers—or what the Electric Power Research Institute is starting to call smart-grid interfaces—is saving energy. For one thing, they can set the voltage of electricity at any given time so that it is at the minimum level appliances need to perform properly. One recent study suggested that doing this could reduce power consumption in the United States by up to 3 percent, which is equivalent to several times as much power as is now generated by all solar panels in the U.S. Even larger energy savings could be seen if smart transformers supplied DC power rather than AC to servers in data centers. Ordinarily, the servers convert the AC to DC themselves—and they do it inefficiently. (Other inefficient conversions, too, are involved in the uninterruptable power supply.) A recent demonstration of such a system by Duke Energy, a large utility company, and the Electric Power Research Institute found that supplying DC could cut power consumption at data centers by about 15 percent.

ChannelWeb has some speculation about icelandic volcano eruptions making people think twice about hosting data centres there to take advantage of abundant clean energy sources - Volcanic Ash May Impact Iceland's Data Center Plans.

Iceland says its cool climate and abundant supply of geothermal and hydroelectric energy makes it a prime spot for IT data centers. But in the wake of a major volcanic eruption earlier this week, companies may be thinking twice about hosting core IT assets in a place where Mother Nature is known for being a bit unstable.

Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted for the first time in nearly 200 years on Monday, sending ash nearly 40,000 feet into the air and shutting down heavily traveled air routes in northern Europe and Scandinavia. The eruption triggered flooding and sporadic ash fall of up to three millimeters thick around the eruption site, according to a Thursday report from the Icelandic Government Information Center.

It's unclear if the ash fall is affecting Iceland's IT infrastructure, as Channelweb.com's attempts Thursday to contact Icelandic solution providers were unsuccessful. But according to one local news report, the ash fall is the largest Iceland has seen since an eruption in 1918, and scientists aren't ruling out the possibility that the volcano could keep erupting.

Data centers are constructed to withstand environmental extremes and natural disasters, but volcanic ash is known for its ability to wreak havoc on desktops, servers, and basically any type of IT infrastructure that has moving parts.

Volcanic ash also contains silica sand, an abrasive, conductive material that's capable of destroying circuit boards. With the weight and consistency of talcum powder, ash can easily slip through air conditioning systems, even with filters installed.

The volcanic eruption comes at a time when Iceland's data center building push is beginning to gain momentum. In January, Verne Global, a data center developer based in Keflavik, Iceland, and Washington, D.C ., inked a deal with Wellcome Trust, a global biomedical research firm, to build a 44 acre data center facility on the site of a former NATO Command Centre in Keflavik, Iceland.

Australian bank NAB has implemented a variant on a cogeneration system (apparently using traditional technology rather than a "Bloom Box" style fuel cell) within their main data centre in order to cut power bills and Tri-generation plant to cut bank's energy bill.

NATIONAL Australia Bank expects to save nearly $1 million in annual power costs by installing a tri-generation plant at its main data centre in Melbourne. Tri-gen plants produce electricity and use waste energy to produce heat and cooling. The resulting energy consumption is much lower than using a traditional electricity grid.

NAB embarked on the tri-gen path two years ago for sustainability purposes, as it was facing power consumption growth of 10 per cent annually.

Trigen technology introduces cooling processes into co-generation technology, which reuses heat from energy manufacture. Co-generation is the technology behind the famous New York stream system which transports heat for homes and office buildings.

The gas-powered data centre channels excess gas — heated to more than 300ºC — into the 2 megawatt trigen plant where it is sent into an absorption chiller that boils refrigerant liquid to produce cold water for cooling.

NAB data centre platform specialist, Glenn Allan, said the trigen plant was quietly switched on early this month. “We are farming a single energy expense for multiple re-use,” Allan said. “We are the first [to use trigen] in data centres, but you will be able to count the months until the next deployment.”

Allan said trigen power will gradually replace the data centres’ remaining energy grid dependence and will be considered for incorporation into all new NAB data centres. “These aren’t emergency stand-by technologies — they are running the baseload power every day of the week,” Allan said. ...

NAB’s primary Melbourne data centre has been a favourite of the banks’ carbon razor gang, as part of the carbon neutral initiative through which the bank has conducted efficiency assessments, bought a fleet of hybrid vehicles, switched to 10 per cent green power and slashed energy use in its 790 branches. ...

Power and cooling costs can also be significantly reduced by replacing ordinary servers with blades and using virtualisation, Allan said. Blade servers are the staple in NAB’s data centres and, while virtualisation has been deployed extensively, he warned that the enterprise consolidation ratios may not reach some of the more optimistic predictions. Allan said the most productive uses of virtualisation are only coming out now after the “toy factor” mentality has passed.

“There is a litany of inventions in history where the usefulness is only discovered later… virtualisation could be made more useful if I could create backup application on a server, inflate it for 90 minutes then remove it so it doesn’t take up resources,” he said.

“[Virtualisation] will lower the server-to-power ratio — NAB has 16 blades to six power supplies — and if you virtualise, the ratio becomes incredible,” he said. “The case for virtualisation is off the table; everyone should do it, if not for the power savings than for the improved change management capabilities.”

The data centre uses cold and hot isle systems and Allan, who is eagerly watching research in jet impingement chip cooling, said every data centre should operate advanced cooling management models.

Fast Company has an article on Facebook's new 147,000 square foot, energy efficient data centre in Oregon - Facebook Buys Dedicated Data Center, Could Servers Be Far Behind? .

Facebook is so mind-bogglingly vast--350 million users, 70% of them actively using applications on the service--that it's almost impossible to comprehend what it does with all that data. Which makes it surprising that it's taken this long for Facebook to open a purpose-built and self-owned data center. What's more, this move could clear a path for Facebook to design and build its own servers. ...

Which is where Oregon enters the frame, and today's news that Facebook will be moving into a purpose-built multi-million dollar data center facility in Prineville. Oregon was able to offer Facebook "a unique combination of suitable climate for environmental cooling, renewable power resources" as well as the availability of a suitable site, the company's Director of Site Operation, Tom Furlong, noted in Governor Ted Kulongoski's press release on the matter. Apparently the facility will be designed to meet LEED gold standards, employing innovative cooling and power management to "make it one of the most energy efficient data centers in the United States."

Which is pretty impressive credentials for what many have dismissed as a "time wasting" social networking fad that's barely making any profit. It also means Facebook's joining the growing trend of highly eco-conscious data centers, which will be an important move as our increasingly online life generates more and more data.

Heiliger also hinted that there are more innovative moves like this on the way--along the lines of "designing and building our own servers." The evolution from building huge data centers to designing servers is not uncommon, Google did the same thing. One requirement for building such hardware is to have a verifiably secure facility to experiment with new server architecture, which this data center will clearly supply.

For years, my guess has been that this other angle of the mass intercept program is related to persistent geosurveillance of targeted individuals. At a minimum, this is probably a component of the MAIN CORE system.

In the article below, Declan McCullagh writes, “Cellular providers tend not to retain moment-by-moment logs of when each mobile device contacts the tower, in part because there’s no business reason to store the data, and in part because the storage costs would be prohibitive.”

Just a few days ago, another of McCullagh’s articles made a similar, limited hangout argument about the retention of URLs.

Focusing on the network operators misses the point. The beam splitters don’t discriminate; they send a copy of everything, every single bit, to Uncle. So, sure, the carriers don’t want to spend money on archiving all of that surveillance data, but what is the state doing with its copy of the stream? ...

Related:

Brand New 1.5 Million Square Foot NSA Data Centers (Utah / Texas)

Technology Review has an article on how "Custom datacenters can help lower energy consumption" (something that is needed given the rapid growth in power consumption by large scale hosting facilities) - Greener Computing in the Cloud.

The issue of surging worldwide IT-related energy consumption is both a bottom-line concern to the companies involved and, increasingly, an environmental worry. Energy consumption from data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005--from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of world total electricity consumption. That figure, which currently stands at around 1.5 percent, is expected to rise further. According to a study published in 2008 by the Uptime Institute, a datacenter consultancy based in Santa Fe, NM, it could quadruple by 2020. ...

Cloud-computing companies hope to offer a solution by focusing on energy efficiency within massive data centers.

Yahoo, for example, broke ground on a data center near Buffalo, NY, last month that will use as little as one-quarter the electricity of older data centers, says Scott Noteboom, senior director of data center engineering at the company. Once finished, the servers inside this data center will be more efficient from a computational standpoint--using less power when they are performing fewer computations--and the building itself will mainly exploit natural air flows to keep hot servers cool. On days above 27° C, managers will switch on air conditioning, which in this case employs evaporative cooling, that should only need to be used 212 hours per year.

Green building of the week from Inhabitat is this German data centre - World’s First LEED Platinum Data Center Opens in Germany.

Germany recently joined the ranks of the green elite with the completion of Citigroup’s stunning new Data Center in Frankfurt. Designed by leading sustainable architecture and engineering firm Arup Associates, the 230,000-square-foot facility’s efficient use of energy and resource-conserving design have made it the first data center in the world to achieve LEED Platinum! That’s no small task considering the energy required to keep stacks of servers running smoothly in a climate-controlled environment.

Citigroup’s new data center outwardly showcases its green credentials throught the extensive use of recycled and locally sourced materials and alternating green facades - a green wall on one side of the complex and a fenestrated window panel on the other. Whereas the green wall serves to insulate the building’s interior, the fenestrated window offers daylighting while providing the opportunity for natural ventilation. The facility is topped off by a vegetated green roof that actively keeps the building cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter while absorbing rainwater. Plant topology was carefully selected to enhance the operational energy efficiency of the building.

While the building’s envelope aesthetically projects sustainable design practices, the most radical green innovations occur on the inside. Citi Data Center will use only 30 percent of the power required for services that a typical data center would utilize, and only requires 40 percent of the heating energy. Additionally, through the use of innovative reverse osmosis water treatment for cooling, the building will save 50 million liters of water per year.

TreeHugger has a post on a cool new technique from Google to minimise energy used to cool data centres - Google Data Center Uses No Chillers - Will It Soon Follow the Moon?.

A Google data center in Belgium is taking a cool, new approach to keeping from over-heating on hot days. The facility has electricity-sucking chillers to support its cooling systems, relying instead on air from outside. Google anticipates this so-called "free cooling" for about seven days per year, but what's really fascinating is what happens when the weather gets hot.

Quest for Energy Efficiency Back-Story

Chillers used to refrigerate water to cool data centers require, no-duh, a large amount of electricity to operate. This has led to the approach “free cooling:” air from outside the data center is used when the temperature is cool, while falling back on chillers on warmer days. Google's data center near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium completely eliminates chillers altogether. Bonus: an on-site water purification facility allows for the use of water from a nearby industrial canal rather than a municipal water utility.

So what happens on hot weather days?

Google will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers.

The end-game of this approach is what cloud technologists refer to as “Follow the Moon” energy management. Were large-scale networks such as Google to implement this concept, workloads would be seamlessly shifted between data centers to take advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. Virtualized workloads would be shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates. Cool!

Yahoo has a blog post on their new green data centre - Serving up greener data centers.

This morning, at a press conference in Buffalo, New York, with New York Governor David Paterson and Senator Chuck Schumer, we took another big step forward in addressing climate change. We announced plans to build one of the greenest, most energy-efficient data centers in the world.

This is significant because data centers represent the majority of our energy consumption. Keeping Yahoo! running smoothly for more than 500 million people around the world calls for a lot of server power. So we’ve made it a priority to become a leader in designing and building data centers that are environmentally sustainable, investing millions to design facilities that make the best use of the energy we consume.
Here’s what makes us so proud of our future New York data center plans. First, it will be powered by one of the cleanest utilities in the country – fed predominantly by renewable hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls. And second, a record 90% of that energy will power the servers. To put that in context, the industry average is 50% or lower, with the other half dedicated mostly to keeping the servers cool.

For data center geeks, we expect our Buffalo Lockport, NY, data center design will have an annualized average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.1 or better. To achieve that, we’ve come up with a unique building design that we call the Yahoo! Computing Coop (because it looks like something chickens live in), which is angled to take advantage of Buffalo’s microclimate, using 100% outside air to cool the servers.

We’ve been pushing green data center standards since we started building our own data centers two years ago. For example, our facilities in Washington are powered by zero-carbon wind and hydroelectric sources, and we use free cooling for most of the year, dropping energy consumption by 40-50%. As we build more capacity to meet demand, we’ll continue to focus on innovations and inventions that improve energy efficiency.

And we’ve been sharing best practices to encourage the entire industry to put smarter policies in play.

The Google Blog has some notes on their ongoing efforts to increase the energy efficiency of data centrres, as part of their "Green IT" theme this year - More computing, less power.

In the fall we posted information about the efficiency of Google data centers and promised to update this information every quarter. We've now collected data for the fourth quarter of 2008 and published them to our sustainable computing website. Specifically, we're keeping track of the efficiency of any Google-designed data center with an IT load of at least 5 MW and a time-in-operation of at least 6 months. In Q4 our average power and cooling overhead in these facilities was 16%, bringing the overhead for the trailing 12 months to 19% (down from 21% a quarter earlier). For comparison, a recent EPA report put the overhead of the average enterprise data center at 100% or higher. We're very happy to have further improved our efficiency, and a number of factors contributed to that result.

First, efficiency is affected by seasonal weather patterns — cooler weather is better than hot weather, and several of our facilities benefited from that in Q4. Also, we continually review our efficiency metrics so that we notice, for example, that one of our data centers is not performing consistently with others of similar size and locale. So we'll take a closer look at optimizing that facility. Are we using fans to cool spaces that don't need to be cooled? Is the thermostat at the right set-point? Can we reduce the time the chillers need to run while keeping the machines operational? So we apply lessons we've learned from better-performing data centers to other facilities, and several such improvements took place in Q4. For the nitty-gritty technical details, visit our data center efficiency page.

While we've made a lot of progress in data center efficiency, we're still learning. As we continue to explore ways to use the least amount of power to do the most amount of computing, we'll continue to share our data and best practices with you. In early March we will participate in the CeBIT conference where we plan to disclose more details on our sustainability efforts as part of this year's theme of "Green IT." Stay tuned.

Business Green reports that plans to build a tidal powered data centre in Scotland continue to progress - Plans for tidal-powered "Blue Data Centre" flow forward.

Innovative plans for what promises to be the world's first tidal-powered datacentre moved a step closer to reality today with the news that the company behind the tidal turbine technology, Atlantis Resources Corporation, has signed a development partnership with datacentre developer Internet Villages International (IVI).

Under the terms of the alliance, IVI is expected to build an energy-efficient "Blue Data Centre" that will be connected to Atlantis' planned tidal power arrays in the Pentland Firth off the north coast of Scotland.

Atlantis plans to install two 10MW tidal current turbines and will also seek to exploit a planning loophole that allows fast connection of demonstration tidal turbines generating 10MW or less to the grid by inviting a third-party tidal energy firm to also install another 10MW system at the site.

"This project is so exciting because it allows us to sidestep the GB queue for connection to the grid; something which has traditionally held back remote renewable energy projects", explained Dr James Mitchell, head of business development at Atlantis.

IVI, which describes itself as a sustainable property company specialising in energy-efficient datacentres, is to build a datacentre requiring 150MW with the three turbine systems initially expected to provide 30MW of power. Should they prove successful, Atlantis hopes to gain planning permission for further tidal arrays that would not only allow all the energy needs of the datacentre to be met using tidal power, but also enable unused energy to be sold to the grid.

Business Green has a report on the latest example of the trend towards clean energy powered data centres - Morgan Stanley eyes up tidal-powered datacentre.

A group of investors, including investment bank Morgan Stanley, are set to fund a £250m off-grid tidal-powered datacentre in the north of Scotland, it was confirmed yesterday. The banking giant said it is to work with tidal power company Atlantic Resources Corporation – in which it holds a stake – to build the site by 2011.

The datacentre would require about 150Mw hours of power and the alliance wants this energy to be sourced entirely from tidal arrays.

The zero-carbon datacentre will seek to tap into increasing demand for greener IT systems and be opened up to third-party companies to hire space. " They will be looking for tenants for the datacentre," said a spokesman for the partnership.

The scheme must still secure planning permission to go ahead, and although the Scottish government has recently signalled its support for marine energy projects, only one commercial-scale tidal energy project has so far gone into operation in the UK – and that took 13 years to come to fruition.

However, the Morgan Stanley project is expected to avoid one of the main technical challenges faced by tidal energy projects, by connecting direct to the datacentre facility and not linking to the national grid.

The project is the latest in a series of innovative proposals designed to tackle datacentres' increasing energy use and associated carbon emissions. Globally, datacentres are responsible for the same amount of emissions as an average European country, according to research by Gartner – accounting for about a quarter of the 580 million tonnes used by IT equipment worldwide.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change estimates server farms are responsible for three per cent of electricity use in the UK, a figure expected to double by 2020.

Consequently, growing numbers of firms are investigating ways to power da tacentres using renewable energy. Earlier this year, submarine cable operator Farice signed a £12m deal with networking company Thus for a high-bandwidth internet connection between UK businesses and datacentres in Iceland that could be powered using emission-free geothermal energy.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on efforts to redcue energy consumption in large data centres, now being actively promoted by hardware companies like IBM and HP - Cutting Tech's Energy Bill.

International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other big computer makers are spotting opportunity in customers' desire to curb electricity usage in large corporate data centers, where energy use has soared in recent years.

Rising electricity prices, coupled with new computer servers that run hotter and require more power, has corporate technology buyers looking for ways to cut back. Power use in data centers -- the large, climate-controlled rooms that house a company's computer servers, storage devices and communications switches -- doubled from 2000 to 2006 and now accounts for about 1.5% of U.S. electricity consumption, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A recent McKinsey & Co. report says that world-wide, the centers' carbon emissions exceed those of Argentina.

Somewhat ironically, the companies that designed and sold those computers are now able to capitalize on the higher power bills the machines rack up.

IBM surprised Wall Street this year when it said its new "Green Data-Center Services" business -- which redesigns customers' data centers and sells energy-efficient products -- signed $300 million in orders in the 2007 fourth quarter. The company has declined to release figures for 2008.

IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano recently told analysts that IBM expects more than 70% of the world's biggest companies "will modify their data centers significantly in the next five years" to deal with energy shortfalls and rising costs.

CNet's GreenTech blog is speculating that Google may be thinking about build floating data centre's one day - Google files patent for wave-powered floating data center. Fans of Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon will no doubt recognise the potential for the creation of offshore data havens - or perhaps more than just data.

Google sees the future of computing at sea.

The search giant has filed a patent for a "floating data center" that uses wave motion to power on-board computers and the ocean's water to cool them.

The patent was submitted in February last year but was spotted in the U.S. Patent & Trademark office's electronic filings and posted at Slashdot on Saturday.

The system Google engineers sketch out is a self-powered data center placed three to seven miles offshore, potentially operating off the grid. Standard shipping containers would house racks of computers that could be transported by truck and placed onto a boat by crane.

A wave-power generator would be the primary source of electricity. But wind turbines could be used to, for example, run water pumps and a tidal power generator could be used in rivers.

The patent specifies the use of a so-called Pelamis machine, which uses pontoons with pumps to convert wave motion into electricity. A British company, Pelamis Wave Power, is operating a prototype in Scotland and intends to install one off Portugal.

Google engineers calculate that an array of pontoons spread over a square kilometer (a bit more than a half mile) could produce 30 megawatts of electricity, enough to operate a single system.

Also envisioned is equipment to use the direct current electricity to run DC-capable computers, which some people consider more energy-efficient than using alternating current.

Earth2Tech has an article on the possibility of data centres following the example of aluminium smelters by chasing renewable energy sources - Data Centers Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind (via Politics In The Zeros).

Data centers’ ability to suck up inordinate amounts of electricity is turning them into the Hummers of the computing world. And much like Hummers, their power-guzzling ways means they are becoming increasingly costly to run. We’ve already covered the efforts of companies to reduce heat, increase server utilization and build green data centers. Now Andrew Hopper, head of the Cambridge University Computing Lab, is working on a solution that could help reduce the demand data centers place on the grid.

Hopper’s vision combines cloud computing and renewable energy: He wants to take electrical transmissions costs out of the equation by placing a data center directly at the site of a renewable energy source and use fiber optic cable to link it to the entity that uses it. Hopper is also the co-founder of Level 5 Networks, which was bought by 10 Gigabit chip maker SolarFlare.

Virtualization and fast Ethernet, which enable services such as Amazon’s EC2, will make Hopper’s idea feasible. The ability to separate the hardware from software through virtualization is what enables computing clouds to exist. Those clouds allow companies, developers or anyone with the ability to tap into that resource, to ship its computing jobs over to Amazon’s servers, no matter where they are located in the world.

The challenge is figuring out how to build software that can monitor electrical generation, prioritize compute jobs and then figure out when and where to send those jobs based on whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Hopper believes it would make sense to attach data centers, possibly in a container, directly to a renewable energy source. The source could be located in the middle of a desert, on a platform attached to an ocean wind turbine, or anywhere else where power could be easily generated.

One of the issues with renewable sources of energy, is that the places where it’s most abundant, such as winds blowing across the ocean or solar power in the desert, are inaccessible and thus, expensive to attach to the electrical grid. An example is Texas’ $4.9 billion plan to bring wind energy generated in the barren, western part of the state to the more populous center. Bringing the data center to the power solves that problem as long as the area can be reached via a cheaper fiber optic cable. There are still issues of servicing such remote data centers, but the plan to have multiple ones around the world offers redundancy.

But there are still computing tasks that need to be worked out if this vision is to materialize in the next decade or so. “If it turns out you’re chasing the energy and copying a lot of data, then that’s less attractive,” says Hopper. “But with good caching, and if you’re only moving the data once or twice it, might work. You could design software similar to old-fashioned job scheduling on a mainframe. Back then the scarcity was the computing and today it’s energy.”