Smarter Cities, Sustainable Buildings and Other Green Things

Last week I attended the 2011 Heartland GreenUp, and for the sake of reporting it, and for those unable to attend I thought I would share some of the insights I took away.

Harris M. Warsaw from IBM was the keynote and had several interesting statistics and notes about the Smarter Planet - The Green Message:

• $40 billion lost to inefficient supply chains
• The Port of Jersey has 100,000 empty ISO shipping containers. Maybe Google is ramping up for their floating data centers in the Atlantic. :)
• In the Smarter Cities initiative, IBM defines smarter as instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent.
• 80% of CEO's view sustainability as impacting brand value
• 82% of executives expect some form of climate change regulations in the next 5 years.
• Dubuque, Iowa is a pilot city for applying all of the IBM Smarter City initiatives. Last month IBM had a press release about how they combined analytics, cloud computing and community engagement for the City of Dubuque.
• Talking to the increase in monitoring and measurement devices around energy - Harris stated that people that have data are 8 times more likely to take action on problems that are uncovered.
• 24 Iowa companies are partnering with IBM to build software and integration around the Dubuque smarter cities project.

If it wasn't for my passion for technology, I think I would have been an architect. So - one of the sessions I highlighted before attending the conference was with Kevin Nordmeyer, who is the Director of the Iowa Energy Center - formerly with RDG Architects. Kevin had some very insightful comments about IEC projects and overall building design and sustainability. Here are some notes/links from his talk:

• Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) - Flowchart of Energy Use in the U.S.
• The Iowa Energy Resource Station - doing work for LLNL and researching energy performance in buildings with real-time, real-life systems.
• BECON - a focal point for developing value-add products from Iowa's biomass resources. BECON stands for Biomass Energy CONversion facility.
• Numerous software and tools at the Department of Energy web site.

Jurij Paraszczak - Leader of the Research Smarter Cities program at IBM. Jurij talked a lot about the case studies they have been a part of in the smarter cities projects. With the massive amounts of data collected during these projects, analytics plays a major role in making sense of the data being researched. Speaking to smarter analytics, he described them as either prescriptive, predictive, or descriptive.

Andrew Winston was the final talk and presented a nice summary of his research, case studies and echoed many of the themes of the day.

• GoodGuide.com - find green and socially responsible products - or see how the ones you use regularly rate.
• An interesting case on how 'culture matters' in sustainability -- BestBuy ranks 1000 stores for efficiency; this engages individual store managers to compete so their store isn't listed as #1000.
• Waste Management now produces more energy than solar.
• Reduced environmental impact meets cleaning - Minnesota company Tennant and their floor cleaner that uses just water (no chemicals)

Beacon Power 20MW Flywheel Plant

Those interested in data centers are more than likely interested in power, renewables, the grid, the smart grid, etc., as it is of vital importance to ensuring maximum uptime. Upon my holiday surfing recently I came across an interesting article about flywheels and flywheel frequency regulation. I've been intrigued about flywheels recently because....... well, just because.

Beacon Power (BCON) announced that they have made substantial progress toward completion and partial start-up of the 20-megawatt (MW) flywheel frequency regulation plant the Company is building in Stephentown, New York. If you aren't sure what flywheel frequency regulation is, check out their explanation here. Popular Mechanics listed Flywheel energy storage as the '#1 Tech concept you need to know for 2011'.

The Stephentown plant has had 100 of the total 200 flywheels installed. When finished the 20MW plant will operate continuously, storing and returning energy to the grid to provide approximately 10% of New York's overall frequency regulation needs. The project was financed from a $43 million guaranteed loan from the DOE.

Beacon is authorized for 5 of the U.S. power grids and according to their annual presentation this past summer they are applying a $24 smart grid stimulus to a second plant in either Chicago or Hazle township, Pennsylvania.

Beacon's stock is certainly not very promising, but I think the use for their product/service is interesting and has a lot of potential as energy storage and regulation evolve with an increasing amount of renewable energy sources feeding the grid.

Heartland Green Up Wrap-up

Last Wednesday I attended the Heartland Green Up in Des Moines. Besides being a big proponent of technology, Iowa, and technology in Iowa -- this symposium was an awesome event, and I hope the success it had this year is dwarfed by future years.

The opening keynote was Randy Mott, Executive VP and CIO of HP. Having the experience that Randy does, and the responsibility of that title for a $100+ billion company is quite impressive and I thoroughly enjoyed his talk. We viewed videos of their Wynyard and Houston data centers and witnessed the implemented technologies set to help achieve their goal of saving 1 billion kWh by 2011. Data Center Knowledge has a nice write-up of the facility -- and here is the video we viewed. The 360k square foot Wynyard facility opened in February 2010, uses 10% wind energy, has an 'excellent' BREEAM rating, and uses 50% less CO2 than comparable HP data centers.

The second talk I attended was Jim Borendame from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo has a huge presence in Des Moines and I enjoyed Jim's IT-centric approach to going green. In 2005 Wells Fargo made a 10 point environmental commitment to itself and stake holders. With 61,000 physical and virtual servers, 61PB of storage and 8MW data centers, Jim has a lot to manage. IT metrics like those from IDEAS International helped green projects save enough money that they did not have to build a new data center -- even though they had board approval for a tier 4, $350 million facility. Other things such as 9:1 compression ratio using deduplication technologies, and moving to the latest VMware VSphere to enable more virtual servers also helped improve IT efficiencies and save money. Even with their impressive IT asset portfolio, it isn't enough to necessitate looking at data center containers. I couldn't resist asking, but even a company the size of Wells Fargo doesn't fit the business case for doing a container data center farm -- guess we'll leave that to Google and Microsoft for now.

Una Song from EnergyStar went over a number of programs and projects under way. Energystar.gov/datacenters covers information about Enterprise Servers and Data Center Energy Efficiency Initiatives. Data Center Knowledge interviewed Andrew Fanara, who recently left EnergyStar. DCK also has a post on the EnergyStar rating for servers coming soon. The Department of Energy also has a Industrial Technologies Program site for saving energy in data centers.

The conference saved the rock star for last -- Bill Weihl, Energy Czar at Google. Even though it was the end of a long day - everyone enjoyed Bill's speech, knowledge and enthusiasm. Bill had 10 lessons from Google as it relates to energy / green programs -- but a heavy focus was on #1 - We need cheap, clean energy. It is well known that Google has invested in solar and wind, as well as this crazy offshore data barges concept, which just baffles me. Stacey Higgenbotham interviewed Bill after the GreenNet conference and talks about the huge responsibility Google has to buy green power, and build efficient data centers.

Overall it was a very good conference to attend -- big names, big/timely topics, and good networking. I'll be back next year!

Green News Week

Being in between the GreenNet conference last week and the upcoming Heartland Green Up (which I am going to) -- I have a lot of green news in my browser cache. There were several interesting things at the GreenNet conference that caught my attention -- most notably the Google Budget Containment system. I've looked at air curtains before and have been intrigued...I think they give an attractive solution to most any data center and Google highlights the flexibility it allows them. The Greenpeace IT rankings were also announced at the conference, with Cisco taking the #1 spot. Jonathan Koomey also spoke on a panel at GreenNet about the Dematerialization opportunity.

I also caught a Seattle Xconomy story last week about Cisco and a Verdiem, an energy management software company teaming up. Through the Cisco "EnergyWise Orchestrator" brand they will market Verdiem software for PCs and networked devices. I still think that 'one' of the Cisco acquisitions in 2010 will be related to their building management / EnergyWise division.

Another green story last week was from the U.S. Green Building Council -- saying that they were selected to help empower a new generation of green building student leaders. At the Clinton Global Initiative University annual meeting the USGBC and others were called to help students jumpstart their careers in green building and sustainability through the USGBC Student program. At the conference all attendees were asked to make a commitment to action, a comprehensive, formal plan to address a specific problem around the world, in their community or on their campus.

An interesting item I ran across in my neck of the woods was the Eco4 Partners project for Moss Green Urban Village. The project is developing 170 acres of land in Iowa City, Iowa as a 'green' office and research park, allowing developers to apply for tax increment financing. The most cost effective energy saving and green technologies will be used -- shooting for near Net Zero in energy usage. Buildings will use 60% less BTU's per square foot than a conventional office building.

This coming Wednesday at The Heartland Green Up conference in Des Moines I'll learn about green lessons learned at HP and Oracle, as well as efficient data centers at Wells Fargo and MidAmerican's wind energy program. I'm also going to try and attend the track with Kevin Monson and Tom Struve, talking about the ACT data center in Iowa City that achieved LEED platinum status. It should be an awesome event!

The Heartland Green Up Conference

Just a few weeks left until The Heartland GreenUp! If you haven't heard about this event -- please check it out. It is shaping up to be an outstanding symposium and expo. The goal of the conference is to "promote awareness of and best practices in reducing overall energy consumption and carbon footprints in information technology. This premiere event provides a forum to discover and share new, innovative green products and services".






I am personally looking forward to a few of the keynote speakers - including Randy Mott from HP. Randy is executive vice president and chief information officer at HP. Also delivering keynotes are Andrew Fanara works from ENERGY STAR and Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar at Google.

Please don't think of this as some little, local event -- this is global conference for all those interested in learning about GreenIT and networking with others in the industry. In ONE event, it will bring together:

"a group of global enterprise and government thought-leaders for one, intense day of networking: to share latest research, brass-tacks case studies and fast-paced total-immersion backgrounders on enterprise-wide sustainable IT best-practice; next-gen datacenter architectures, power management strategies and facilities engineering; cloud computing and virtualization; and on the nuts and bolts (and business case) for plugging into wind and solar, biomass and other emerging energy technologies"

If not able to attend in person, the Technology Association of Iowa will host a Virtual GreenUp to let you attend keynotes, track sessions and network with speakers, sponsors and peers.

I am going! Will you?

Register Now!

Intel's Green Power

I have run across several news items about Intel Inc. lately and thought I would share.  

The first was a ComputerWorld article last week about the EPA Study on energy saving opportunities in servers and data centers.  Intel has been working closely with the EPA to develop the new data center energy performance rating.  About a month ago Intel launched their 5500 series processors and their Data Center Efficiency Challenge.  

The second and third items were Forbes.com articles.  The first one I actually read about in an archaic media form called a....... "magazine".  :)    Luckly, there was an online version of the same thing.  This article discusses how Intel is spending $7 Billion (with a B) to downsize its chips.  I guess there are buildings more expensive than data centers to build!  The second article was discussing how well situated Intel is in the current recession.  $3.5 Billion in cash, $4.2 Billion in short-term securities, and a gross margin of 46%!

The fourth item is actually how I started this blog post -- The EPA announced their list of the largest green power purchasers in the U.S. and Intel ranked #1!  You can find the National Top 50 list here.  I also then checked out a 'provider' company that seemed to be used a lot by the top 50 companies - 3Degrees.  

Since I am a maps fanatic and like to look at Fortune 500 corporate campuses (from Google Maps) I had an urge to map the top 10 in the EPA's Green Power Purchasers list.  

View EPA National Top 50 in a larger map

GE 750kVA SG Series Digital Energy UPS

Yesterday GE Digital Energy (a division of General Electric) announced that its 750kVA SG Series Digital Energy UPS has been certified as an Ecoimagination product.

“As the IT industry’s demand for data storage grows significantly each year, so does the amount of energy needed to run servers and data centers,” said Larry Sollecito, President and CEO, GE Digital Energy. “GE’s investment in more energy efficient UPS technology helps data centers achieve a high level of energy efficiency without sacrificing high power capacity or reliability. A number of large data centers have already placed orders for the highly efficient 750kVA UPS.”

I'm going to have to look at this UPS a little closer. The press release touts some impressive cost savings figures.

Check out the press release here

and the product page here.

GreenTech and DataCenters - Part 4

I wasn't planning a part 4 to my GreenTech week, but as I mentioned, there is a LOT of Green news out recently. Here are just a few more goodies I ran across today:

The Uptime Institute released its Global Green 100 List today. Many familiar names in tech are on the list including all of the companies I mentioned in GreenTech Part 2.

GreenBiz.com notes that Green, Tech and GreenTech are on the rise in the FastCompany 50 List. Cisco managed the #5 spot on the 2009 list. Cisco has a number of videos I found interesting lately:

• A new TechWise TV podcast is out and discusses Cisco EnergyWise

• John Chambers is 'the man'. This video at OpenZine is a talk he gave on the MIT campus and is long, but worth watching. If you don't watch the whole thing, do forward to about 44 minutes in where he answers a question -- I really like what he says here. He is an awesome speaker and as commented on the page with the video -- "John Chambers gets it" ; except for the comment John makes in the video about being a Red Sox fan. :)
  

• Another video: Rethinking Education for the 21st Century was posted on a Cisco blog.

Rackspace announced today some new tools available to help customers assess and reduce their environmental impact. Their carbon footprint calculator was developed by NativeEnergy.

Check out this video from Google and GE : Plug Into the Smart Grid

An article from the Wall Street Journal Environmental Capitalism section was pretty interesting: Purdue Researchers Put Emissions On Google Earth. Of course any excuse for me to use Google Earth is a good one.

GreenTech and DataCenters - Part 3

For part 3 of my GreenTech week, I have a number of miscellaneous links. I'll keep posting Green links as I run across them, but the following items were pretty interesting.

EWeek's 10 Things You Need to Know NOW About Green IT

Comprehensive (as in 45 page) report from Rackable and the BPM (Business Performance Management) Forum: IT Sustainability Imperatives in Internet and Ecommerce Business. I haven't had a chance to read 'all' of this yet, but it looks very good. They surveyed 275 professionals in December 2008 and January 2009 and also have perspectives from dialogs with prominent executives, thought leaders and industry influencers.

GigaOM's earth2tech reports that San Diego will Roll Out Smart Meters Mid-March

Article at CleanTechies: Distributed Energy Generation - the New Internet

Very interesting article at MIT Technology Review: Graphene for the Green Grid - Ultracapcitors that store more could help the grid run smoothly.

Canada's Advanced Network organization announces an initiative to lay foundation for a zero carbon economy.

I was looking for something to tie GRI standards to GreenTech, but instead found this piece on an ISO Standard for Assessing Energy Efficiency of New Buildings.

My list wouldn't be complete without mentioning the Green Grid. A new site design, white papers, tools and many other things make this site a must-read. The Data Center Facilities Pro blog has a nice write-up of the Green Grid Technical Forum held a few weeks back. Presentations from that forum are also posted on their site.

GreenTech and DataCenters - Part 1

I have been absolutely inundated recently with stories about Green technology, environmental sustainability and the like. I don't want to turn this into a GreenTech blog, but obviously power, renewable energy and environmental sustainability are huge topics for the data center industry.

There are several items in the $787 Billion Economic Recovery Bill that would benefit renewable energy and GreenTech companies, including: $11 Billion for Smart Grids and $15 Billion in renewable energy tax incentives. Cnet's Green Tech also has a nice write-up on the Bill.

I have so many links piled up that I am going to spread them out over this week. Today I'll start with the site that got me thinking about all of this .... The Green and Virtual Data Center. It is an excellent site, and they also have a new book out. The list below is a mix of sites from their 'links' section, and links from my bookmarks that I found interesting

Greenly -- Exploring Greenovation 24/7/365

CarbonFootprint.com

Carbon dioxide emissions calculator

Cassatt Power Savings Calculator

This one is a bit much (IMO), but.... Making Web Sites Green

EPA Tools and calculators

How much does Carbon Offsetting cost?

Planning for Energy Requirements: Dell's Data Center Capacity Planner


The Uptime Institute will host a 2009 IT Symposium: Lean, Clean and Green, April 13 - 16 in New York. Should be interesting.....


Up Next: What the big guys are up to: Cisco, Microsoft, Google, HP, IBM and others

IBM Smart Grid

Just a quick link to a really nice article over at Cleantech. It's about the $819 Billion Stimulus plan that was passed and how there is a lot of money included for smart grid technology. Cleantech interviewed Drew Clark, Director of Strategy for IBM's Venture Capital Group.

One of the companies mentioned, SynapSense makes some pretty cool products for the data center. They were honored by the DOE last fall for their innovative approach to saving energy in the data center. They have a LiveImaging product that provides thermal, pressure and humidity mapping using 3D, real-time data at multiple levels of your data center. SyanpSense will be at the Green Grid Technical Forum in San Jose Feb. 3 - 4.

Check out the Cleantech article here.

Iceland - A Green Data Center Hub?

We've heard the stories in recent months about activities in Iceland and the potential for locating data centers there. The geothermal resources and cold climate make it attractive for a power-hungry data center. The 2008 Icelandic Financial crisis may have some of those big companies that were "looking", thinking twice.

An article at Greentech Media is what had me thinking about Iceland again. The CEO of EYP made some comments about Iceland at a recent round table with reporters. According to the CIA World Factbook, Iceland is slightly smaller than Kentucky, has a population similar to Pitsburgh, and lists natural hazards of earthquakes and volcanic activity. The most interesting part of the article was these two lines:

"So in the future, large companies could roll them from center to center around the world and take advantage of low nightime electricity rates. Some HP customers and HP itself is already examining ways of shifting computing loads with the clock"

Not rocket science in terms of the concept, but it does reinforce the #1 site selection factor of cheap power, and #2, renewable energy possibilites in the area. I think in the end Iceland will loose out to Ireland as far as a European hub for data centers. Who knows though...... maybe Microsoft, Cisco, Google or others will build a cheap skeleton of a facility in Iceland where they could deploy containers quickly/easily -- and then pull them out just as easy to another location if economic problems in the country persisted.