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Thursday, 28 July 2011

Bloom Energy attracts data center operators in Cali

Silicon Valley’s fuel cell maker Bloom Energy continues to add customers looking to power part of their data center operations with distributed, cleaner power in California. On Thursday, the U.S. division of Japanese telecom giant NTT, NTT America, said it will install five Bloom fuel cells at one of its data center facilities in San Jose, Calif.

Nine-year-old Bloom Energy sells an industrial-sized fuel cell (which looks like a large refrigerator) that uses a chemical reaction to produce electricity. The Bloom Boxes suck up oxygen on one side and fuel (usually natural gas or biogas) on the other side, and produce power on-site for companies in a more efficient and less carbon-intensive manner than using the grid (depending on what fuel the company uses).

NTT America says it will use biogas (gas generated by decomposing organic material) produced at a California dairy farm as fuel for the Bloom fuel cells. That means NTT’s fuel cells won’t emit as much carbon as many of the Bloom fuel cells that are being powered by natural gas.

Five Bloom fuel cells have a capacity of 500 kilowatts, which is the equivalent power for about 500 houses or five large office buildings. Each Bloom fuel cell costs around $700,000 to $800,000 before subsidies, so NTT is spending a couple million dollars on the installation.

Data center operators are looking for ways to make their facilities more energy-efficient and greener as a way to cut growing energy bills and also to highlight company sustainability. While fuel cells are still not commonly used to power data centers, Bloom has been slowly growing its customer list of telcos and Internet companies that want to use the Bloom boxes for part of their data center operations.

Earlier this month, AT&T said it plans to install a whopping 7.5 MW worth of Bloom fuel cells (that’s 75 fuel cells) at 11 AT&T offices in California. AT&T said it would use the fuel cell power for data centers as well as administration offices and facilities that house network equipment.

Fuel cells likely won’t be used as a main, or stand alone, power source for a data center. As we pointed out on GigaOM Pro (subscription required) last year, data centers need a power source that is so-called “five nines” (99.999 percent). Google has said the Bloom Box it was using on its campus had an availability rating of 98 percent, which translates into around seven days of downtime a year: no good for a stand alone power source for a data center running web sites that can’t go down.

Bloom has also found success with data center operators in California because state subsidies make the Bloom boxes a lot more economical in California. Customers in the state include Google, eBay and Adobe .

Top image is NTT’s installation, and the bottom is the installation at Adobe.

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Friday, 22 July 2011

Cloud computing could lead to billions in energy savings

Another study out this week has found that if companies adopt cloud computing, they can reduce the energy consumption of their IT and save money on energy bills. The report, created by research firm Verdantix and sponsored by AT&T, estimates that cloud computing could enable companies to save $12.3 billion off their energy bills. That translates into carbon emission savings of 85.7 million metric tons per year by 2020.

The Verdantix report isn’t the first one to deliver such a finding. Last year Pike Research found that cloud computing could lead to a 38 percent reduction in worldwide data center energy use by 2020, compared to what the growth of data center energy consumption would be without cloud computing. Another study from Microsoft, Accenture and WSP Environment and Energy last year found that moving business applications to the cloud could cut the associated per-user carbon footprint by 30 percent for large, already-efficient companies and as much as 90 percent for the smallest and least efficient businesses.

All of that is good news. Cloud computing is one of the most disruptive Internet infrastructure shifts to happen in recent years. Web companies have been embracing cloud computing in order to buy flexible, lower cost, on-demand computing power from companies like Amazon. And these cloud computing services generally replace the computing that would have been done by companies’ own in-house computing resources.

However, it’s always good to take these studies with a grain of salt. There’s a reason AT&T and Microsoft are looking into the energy efficiency of cloud computing: they sell cloud computing services.

Other studies have also found that cloud computing isn’t always the most energy efficient computing option, and in certain instances the cloud can be more energy intensive than traditional in-office computing. A report from University of Melbourne researcher Rod Tucker and his team, which I wrote about for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), found that cloud computing can indeed save energy when it leads simply to the consolidation of servers, but looking at three different applications of cloud computing — storage, software and processing — energy efficiency savings are negated in some scenarios.

For example, one such instance when the cloud isn’t more efficient, according to Tucker’s research, is when companies are using cloud computing for storing data. Tucker found that when the number of downloaded and accessed files becomes larger (more than one download per hour for a public cloud storage service), those energy efficiency gains are erased.

There’s enough research out there by now that shows that cloud computing is overall more energy efficient than traditional in-house computing. Which is great news for Internet companies and cloud computing providers. The growing energy consumption of the Internet, data centers and our always-on connected devices will only continue to grow, so efficiency trends will only to continue to become important.

Image courtesy of The Planet.

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Wednesday, 13 July 2011

AT&T to install Bloom Energy fuel cells

Silicon Valley’s high-profile fuel cell company Bloom Energy has scored its first deal with a telco: AT&T. On Tuesday, AT&T said it plans to install 7.5 MW of Bloom’s fuel cells, which it calls Bloom Energy Servers or Bloom Boxes, at 11 AT&T offices in California, including Redwood City, San Jose and San Diego. AT&T will use the fuel cell power for administration offices, data centers and facilities that house network equipment.

Bloom Energy, which has drawn in at least $400 million in venture capital money from investors like Kleiner Perkins over its lifetime (and reportedly more than that), attributes the secret sauce of its Bloom Boxes to ceramic discs stacked together and interspersed with plates made of a metal alloy. Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar originally came up with the idea for the Bloom Box after developing a device for NASA that would be able to create oxygen on Mars and decided to reverse the process.

So far Bloom has done much of its business within California, because California offers fuel cell installers significant subsidies. Companies with a lot of operations in California like Google, eBay, Adobe , and Kaiser Permanente, have taken advantage of the state subsidies to deploy Bloom’s boxes in an effort to reduce their carbon footprints and gain some green cred.

Telcos are no strangers to using fuel cells for their base stations in remote regions. For example, Sprint is doing a 250 fuel cell test for backup power for its network in the U.S. using a Department of Energy grant, and Vodafone spinout P21 is testing mobile telecom backup fuel cells in Europe.

AT&T’s 7.5 MW fuel cell deal, or roughly 75 Bloom Boxes, is a large one for Bloom. Each Bloom Server provides 100 kW of power each, and costs between $700,000 and $800,000 before subsidies, so AT&T is likely spending in the $50 million range before subsidies for this carbon-reducing tactic. (I’m double checking on these figures with Bloom and will update if needed). 7.5 MW of power can provide 62 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per year, which is enough to power 5,600 homes per year.

Bloom has also been aiming to sell its fuel cells to utilities, though this is a harder market to crack. While the company announced a tentative huge deal with utility Delmarva Power & Light in Delaware, that deal is contingent on certain regulations. However, utilities generally report that they aren’t so interested in fuel cells.

Bloom’s other new strategy to garner business is selling fuel cell power as a service, in much the same way that solar companies sell solar power: Make a 20-year deal with a fixed rate for power, but with no, or little, upfront cost for the fuel cell.

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Friday, 8 July 2011

The future of grid energy storage: Software-as-a-Service

One of the reasons energy storage for the power grid isn’t widely used is that many of the technologies, like batteries, are still far too expensive to be used at grid scale. But what if you could use something that costs a fraction of a battery to deploy for grid storage … like Software-as-a-Service? On Thursday, a startup called Clean Urban Energy (CUE) launched its SaaS product, which uses commercial buildings essentially as thermal batteries, and announced a $7 million investment from VCs Battery Ventures and Rho Ventures.

Here’s how it works: CUE makes a deal with a building owner, then plugs the company’s software into the building’s management system. Over a two-week period, the software crunches the energy consumption and HVAC system data, pulls in outside data like weather and temperature, and eventually creates a model and baseline for how the building consumes energy and how best to optimize that energy use.

The software then is able to shift parts of the building’s energy use via the HVAC system to times of day when a utility’s rates are lower and when there is less demand on the grid. So, say, a building could be subtly pre-cooled on a hot day, before the utility’s peak times occur and the rates are a lot higher. The software can do this without changing the comfort of the people in the building, says Battery Ventures Partner Jason Matlof.

CUE says it can save building owners 15 to 30 percent in energy savings from their HVAC systems. For utilities, the buildings are turned into sort-of thermal batteries that can store energy during peak times, and can enable building owners to participate in utilities’ variable pricing programs.

In contrast to many building management systems that use sensors and extra hardware installed throughout a building — and take weeks or months to integrate — CUE uses no extra gear, and just relies on the building management system and its model to start to work. The system can cost less than $10,000 to get up and running says Matlof, and the low capital required is one of the reasons Battery Ventures funded the company.

The smart algorithms came from the work of one of CUE’s founders, Gregor Henze, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who previously wrote his dissertation on optimal control of thermal energy storage systems. The model is able to accurately predict how the building is going to respond to the current environment in real time and adjust the HVAC system accordingly, says Matlof.

Battery Ventures has backed other low-capital-intensive energy efficiency software plays like networked lighting company Redwood Systems. “We’ve avoided the kinds of companies that get stuck in the Valley of Death, like thin-film solar, utility-scale solar thermal and electric cars,” says Matlof.

CUE’s software reminded me a bit of some of the projects that smart thermostat service company EcoFactor has done, optimizing demand response events for utilities. Though EcoFactor is concentrating on residential buildings, and not, say, a 70-story commercial building that’s in CUE’s cross hairs, the two companies are similar in that they both use big data and predictive algorithms to focus on HVAC as the pain point in a building.

CUE has already done 12 pilots with its software (two in the Chicago area) and has just started selling its software commercially.

Image courtesy of CUE.

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Thursday, 23 June 2011

Chinese Energy Demands Are Starting To Anger Its Neighbors

China’s omnivorous energy requirements have been attracting increasing attention as of late, as Beijing attempts to secure any and all sources of power for its growing industrial base.

Nowhere is this more noticeable than Beijing’s policies in the South China Sea, where Chinese assertions of sovereignty are unsettling the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, all of whom have counter claims on the various shoals and islets.

China’s landward neighbors are also feeling the hot breath of Beijing’s mandarins, however, most notably its economic rival India, with whom China fought a brief war in 1962 in the Himalayas over a disputed frontier, where the alpine conflict, according to China's official military history, achieved China's policy objectives of securing borders in its western sector in retaining Chinese control of the Aksai Chin with India accepting the de facto borders which codified along the Line of Actual Control.

Now China and India are engaged yet again in a spat, this time over the headwaters of the Brahmaputra River. According to New Delhi China is planning up to 24 hydroelectric facilities with a cumulative power generation capacity of nearly 2,000 megawatts along Brahmaputra’s source, the Arun River, before it descends into India.

Further east, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos are alarmed by China’s intentions to build three massive dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong River, adding to six existing hydroelectric facilities. What is singularly lacking in all these plans is any regional or concerted international effort to counter China’s plans.

India's concerns are heightened by the fact that most of its major rivers originate in Tibet, which China invaded and annexed in 1950, declaring it an integral part of “Western China.” Both the Brahmaputra and Indus rivers have their origins in a lake in western Tibet near Mount Kailash.

Complicating India’s efforts to discuss the issue is China’s reluctance to acknowledge the validity of satellite imagery, which Beijing regards as espionage, even though in 2010 China acknowledged as a result of India’s space observation that it was in fact building the Zangmu dam on the Brahmaputra, as the imagery received from Indian satellites confirmed the construction.

Indian strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney observed, "China has always been unapologetic about its refusal to enter into water sharing agreements with any states. It has always maintained that it would take into account interests of the lower riparian states but about half of the world's total number of large dams are in China. India, with so many of its major rivers originating in Tibet, is going to be among the worst affected. The issue is usually soft pedaled by the water resources ministry, and there is never any international pressure on this though the list of countries suffering because of China's refusal is quite long including Russia, Kazakhstan, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos."

Chellaney’s list of aggrieved states along China’s landward frontiers is extensive – what remains to be seen is whether the region’s two substantive powers, Russia and India, are willing to confront Beijing, either singly or in concert, over Beijing’s efforts to harness Asia’s river flow to power its industrial miracle. So far, the signs are not encouraging, as Chinese economic “soft power” seduces Russia and India as covertly as it does America’s economy.

This post originally appeared on Oilprice.com.

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Thursday, 28 July 2011

Bloom Energy attracts data center operators in Cali

Friday, 22 July 2011

Cloud computing could lead to billions in energy savings

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

AT&T to install Bloom Energy fuel cells

Friday, 8 July 2011

The future of grid energy storage: Software-as-a-Service

Thursday, 23 June 2011

Chinese Energy Demands Are Starting To Anger Its Neighbors

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