Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

Sabey Spills Power Cost in Eastern WA

I stopped in at the Uptime Institute Symposium this week in Santa Clara and visited the Sabey booth in the exposition hall (Sabey received a GEIT award at the event). I was impressed by the fact that they touted the energy efficient design and operation of their colocation data centers alongside notes on how cheap the power is feeding the ones in Washington State.

For example, their data center under development in Quincy is fed with hydroelectric power from the adjacent Columbia River, at the stunningly low cost of 2.25 cents per kWh. That's wholly clean power that is less expensive than the lowest prices I've seen quoted in the South (just over three cents per kWh, and mostly sourced from coal-fired plants).

The Quincy data center uses air-side free cooling with evaporative back-up, and you have to praise a company for making that investment when the power prices are so very low.

I thought Quincy took the cake and may very well meet Sabey's claim of the lowest energy price anywhere in the world, but their own information on their Columbia data center in central Washington beats it at 1.96 cents per kWh! The LEED Gold-certified 438,000 square foot facility features free cooling that operates over ninety percent of the year.

Most of Sabey's data centers are in Washington State, but their latest is the conversion of the old Verizon switching center in Manhattan, a high rise with 40 megawatts of power coming from redundant transmission voltage feeds from Consolidated Edison.

Sabey doesn't make any claims for low energy prices in New York, but says that they get a "25% to 30% discount" from ConEd. Utilities generally offer lower rates for customers who take primary or transmission voltage service, but I've never seen discounts that high, so I wonder what the deal is.

Mark Monroe Proposes "Net Zero Overhead" Goal for DCs

I have to admit that my hackles went up when I first skimmed a blog post (published at Data Center Dynamics) by the estimable Mark Monroe (past Executive Director at The Green Grid) on the concept of "net zero overhead" energy use as a reasonable goal for data centers.

On that first read, his proposal that data centers seek renewable and/or self-generation only for the cooling and power delivery and conditioning electric loads looks like a nascent industry cop-out: a way for operators to post a green sign on the door without addressing what can be ninety percent of their environmental impact (the power to drive the IT gear).

But Mark is very careful to pose the proposal as a question - would the concept draw more operators into the fold of seeking greener power options for their facilities? And perhaps even more positively, he squarely addresses the subject that often elicits snickers from the industry, rooftop solar PV for data centers.

Check out his back-of-the-envelop calculations using the NZO concept. For a highly efficient data center (PUE of 1.14) with half of a 30,000 square foot building devoted to IT (and a pretty low rack density of 2.2 kW), a solar array would need only three times the building area to serve the overhead loads, rather than ten times the building area if a Net Zero Energy (all loads) goal was met.

I've been pretty deep in discussions around on-site generation for data centers, and can see why solar PV has poor traction in the industry. If anything, perhaps data center operators are afraid of being laughed at for installing rooftop PV, sensitive to the criticism that they would barely begin to address the total load at the facility.

But even fuel cells have only limited traction in the market, despite the fact that they may offer some reliability benefits and can make some power delivery and conditioning schemes simpler and cheaper. So it can be safely said I think that the data center industry is behind many other sectors in adopting on-site and renewable generation options.

I don't think that the NZO concept will necessarily bring more customers in from the cold on the onsite generation front, which is something of a pity as data centers have the energy density and load profile that would warrant the investment.

What we have to get past is the laugh test though, making room for responsible owners to address even a small portion of their environmental impact. If NZO generates the discussions that get us there, hear, hear. 

Utility Economic Development Teams Target DC Attraction

So we have a story from the always excellent Data Center Dynamics (subscribe here) about another utility that is focusing economic development activities to attract data centers to their service area. This time it is Appalachian Power, a unit of American Electric Power, serving Tenessee, West Virginia, and parts of Virginia.

The utility appears to be doing all of the "right" things to make their service area attractive to new DC development - in particular identifying specific locations where power capacity is available and can be quickly provided for new projects. (It appears that AEP is offering this service across its portfolio of utilities.)

This is similar to what Dominion Power in Virginia offers: they have a crack team that coordinates all aspects of utility service planning for data centers and have also pre-identified locations that they can serve quickly.

I also know that AEP has at least a modest track record in offering energy efficiency programs, and has an effort underway at one of their units to specifically tackle the data center market. (By contrast, Dominion is almost proud of the fact that they don't offer energy efficiency programs.)

The optimist in me would challenge Appalachian Power and AEP to think about offering an energy efficiency service for new data centers, making sure that the facilities they attract are industry-leading in terms of efficient design and operation.

Utilities like Silicon Valley Power, serving the City of Santa Clara, have shown that this is a great value proposition: they too have a great team that makes siting your data center there a seamless and painless process, which is why over half of their load comes from data centers (yes, well over half). But they have also offered robust energy efficiency programs for their data center customers for many years.

And then there is the cynical view. Utility scale data centers are locating in Virginia and environs for one reason only: the power is dirt cheap, because it comes from dirty coal. Energy efficiency incentives, or for that matter the offensive tax breaks that states offer to "compete" in attracting what are acknowledged to be facilities with few employees, really don't matter in the siting decision calculus. 

In a just environment, states and localities would not engage in a race to the bottom, competing to offer breaks to companies that simply don't need them, at the expense of reasonable tax revenues that fund the provision of shared services. 

And as for efficiency, other states need to follow California's lead and enact reasonable energy efficiency standards for new data center construction, so that these facilities don't "value engineer" features out because they don't pencil in the face of sub-four-cent-per-kWh power rates.

EPA Utility Data Center EE Program Guide

I'm surprised I haven't posted on this before, but I was proud to be a part of a team that has developed a Utility Data Center Energy Efficiency Program Guide that has been published by the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Program.

The guide truly distills the best practices for utilities that want to promote energy efficiency for their data center customers, delivering cost-effective results. The report doesn't paper over the challenges in this market (getting trade allies on board, addressing split incentives, free-ridership risks, etc.), and does suggest numerous ways to overcome these market barriers. I like to point out that running a program for this market is no more difficult than those addressing industrial market sectors, and often just as effective.

I have also been participating in monthly webinars for utilities that want to get a taste of what the report covers, and we've had great response rates (almost one hundred participants for the first on last year, and thirty on the call this morning). 

As soon as I can find the EPA's site for signing up for the webinars, I'll post it here.

EUCI Presentation: Utility Rate Fundamentals For Data Centers

Late last year I participated in an EUCI forum on data centers in San Francisco, and thought I'd do a brief post on each of the four presentations I delivered over the day-and-a-half session. Check out EUCI - they offer a robust series of programs and sessions for the energy industry.

We kicked off the event with an hour-and-a-half overview of emerging trends in the market from KC Mares, President of Megawatt Consulting. I haven't managed to find a copy of the slide deck - it would be well-worth getting a hold of it if you can.

My first section was billed as a primer on utility rates as they apply to data centers, and I jumped back and forth between the viewpoint of data center operators and the utilities that serve them, as both groups were pretty evenly represented in the audience.

The upshot is that all of the price signals that utilities try to send to customers don't make it through to decision makers at data centers, and that most of those signals are moot in any event as data centers have essentially unitary load factors.

Despite this, for operators of utility-scale data centers, and for sophisticated utilities, there are opportunities around the margins, for demand response, renewable supply options, and attracting data center development.

Here's a copy of the presentation deck:

Download EUCI Pres 1 Utility Rates

Happy to field questions or comments!

Designing a Utility Incentive Program for Server Virtualization

It appears from market surveys that server virtualization has become a mainstream technology: most operators of enterprise data centers have tried it and are moving to full adoption pretty quickly. 

At the same time, in the two-and-a-half million or so server rooms and closets in the US, there isn’t much data available, though in a small study and anecdotally server virtualization and consolidation doesn’t appear to have much traction.

In California, where the major investor-owned utilities offered incentive programs for virtualization, the Energy Division, a unit of the California Public Utilities Commission devoted to protecting ratepayer interests, has ordered the end of these programs. (They were extended for some public sector customers, but have now completely ended.)

That decision has cast a pall over the entire country, with utilities deciding not to debut programs even though they might have poor market penetration in their service areas.

And more to the point, that atmosphere is leading to reluctance by utilities to address the server room and closet market, where a utility program could make a real impact. 

Just as the decision to extend programs in California for public sector customers was in part a recognition that market penetration was lagging there, is there an opportunity to offer a program specifically targeting server rooms?

There are a few of ways to design such a program: limit customer participation by market segment, or by rate class (which can be a proxy for customer size), or perhaps simply by project size.

While the first two would work and would capture small and medium sized business, for example, they would exclude corporations that often have a large concentration of server rooms “hidden” in their real estate portfolio.

Offering a program that paid an incentive for the first ten or twenty servers removed per site as part of a server virtualization consolidation project would draw in the broadest swath of potential customers. If delivered through IT service providers, the program could truly target the “hard to reach” (that’s a standard utility program term, by the way) server closet market.

And though this program could still reside under a data center and IT market effort, there is some benefit to consider folding it into a commercial office program portfolio. Server rooms can often be a significant portion of the energy use in commercial office facilities but have never been addressed through targeted market programs.

It’s a stretch to think that commercial programs, which address lighting and space conditioning equipment, could encompass server room technologies and measures as well. But if you did, and included desktop infrastructure and office equipment as well, you’d truly have a comprehensive program offering.

The upshot is that while the IT industry focus on data center energy efficiency has been vigorous for the past six years or so, server rooms and closets are only recently gaining attention. Utility program managers have an opportunity to affect this hard-to-reach, dispersed infrastructure using innovative program designs that could legitimately include incentives for server virtualization.

Virtualization Market Penetration

The market for virtualization software is proving something of a conundrum for utility energy efficiency program managers, leading to the cancellation of incentive programs in California, and hesitation by utilities in other states to debut program offerings.

What’s the problem? Utilities are bound by program evaluation principles that prevent providing incentives for technologies that have reached market saturation, or in other words for technologies or measures that customers are implementing on their own without incentives.

So answering the question about market penetration becomes crucial for utilities and program evaluators, and in the case of virtualization, the market statistics paint a murky picture.

I’ve sourced two rather different pictures of the market. The first is a “virtualization industry quarterly survey” prepared by Vanson-Bourne, a market research company, and posted at V-Index.com.

Their latest data indicates that in the US in Q3 2011, over 43 percent of all servers are now virtual, and that almost ninety percent of the companies sampled expected to increase their use of virtualization in the future.

The 500 plus companies that Vanson-Bourne sampled are all “large-scale enterprises”, though significant portions of that sample are located outside of the US. 

(Another interesting set of data from Vanson-Bourne indicates that most end users expected a ten-to-one or so consolidation ratio, but actually achieved on average more like five-to-one. A ratio that low would certainly yield far lower energy savings per project, and the move to newer, more efficient servers would become more of a driver of the savings.)

My second set of information comes from an informal survey done by the Natural Resources Defense Council under the leadership of Pierre Delforge, who is looking at the opportunity for energy efficiency gains in server rooms and closets.

These “distributed data centers” represent that vast majority of facilities, with an estimate of two and a half million compared to twenty thousand or so enterprise data centers. Market research indicates that almost sixty percent of the servers in use today are in these small facilities.

NRDC’s sample size was quite small (about ninety companies and institutions), and they don’t hold it up as a rigorous study, but their results are very interesting.

Of the organizations surveyed, only 37% had virtualized at least one server, and more starkly, less than a quarter expected to pursue additional virtualization projects. 

Even combined, these two data sets paint an incomplete picture with regards to adoption rates of virtualization. You could certainly conclude that most big users have implemented some level of virtualization and are rapidly moving towards saturation levels. 

You could also conclude that small and medium businesses have a much lower adoption rate, and are moving more slowly to make virtualization a standard practice.

What you can’t truly discern is the “squishy middle”: are large, sophisticated users adopting virtualization in their enterprise data centers, but not in their distributed IT infrastructure (server rooms and closets)?

So where does that leave utility programs? In the next post, we’ll look at California, and a design proposal for a utility program to promote virtualization in the distributed data center segment.

 

 

 

Thermal Energy Storage For Data Centers

Thermal energy storage has often seemed an attractive technology application for data centers – providing a sure-fire way to cut energy costs while delivering redundancy for cooling that isn’t found in most facilities.

Here’s how the case would play out:

You’ve got a data center with a totally predictable day-to-day cooling load, so install a thermal energy storage system sized to the four- or six-hour peak rate period from my utility.  (There is a big advantage to having this predictable load; TES systems for offices often fail in execution because control systems are unable to accurately predict loads.)

Make ice or chilled water at night, when electric rates are lowest and when your chiller plant is most efficient due to lower ambient temperatures. Then draw on the thermal bank during peak periods, avoiding peak energy and demand costs.

The redundancy play is that you can provide backup generator power only for pumps and fans, assuming that you’ll have some storage on hand to meet your cooling needs, at least for the duration of a power failure.

The economic model would yield pretty good results for this design: you’ve got to pay for storage, probably an up-rated chiller plant, and controls; in return you get solid, predictable cost savings every summer weekday and probably winter one as well, and some redundancy you didn’t have before that can lower your need for power backup.

So what’s not to like?

In a retrofit scenario, this might all make sense, with the caveat of finding space for the chilled water storage tank or ice bank.  (Space limitations could be the leading killer of TES retrofit projects.) You may already have sunk the costs of backup generation for your chiller plant, but the economics may still work out.

But here’s the real rub: the leading data center designs of today don’t use chilled water at all, they rely instead on air-side economizers supplemented with evaporative cooling.  No need for TES in these designs, and no need for backup power for cooling beyond supplying the fans.

It’s a much more efficient and elegant solution, and leads me to believe that TES for data centers is an unlikely application.

Data Centers in New York/New Jersey

There are good reports in the trade press (notably Datacenter Dynamics and Data Center Knowledge) about data centers in New York and New Jersey who have coped with extended power outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, including tales of fuel delivery difficulties.

I talked with one operator last week who has several facilities affected, and they indicated they were paying half a million dollars a day for diesel fuel to stay up and running. They also had the unfortunate circumstance of having one facility back on utility power, with another a stone's throw away still out.

I had always heard that most operators kept something like eight hours worth of fuel for backup generators on site. The scale of this event may change that standard in the future. I would posit that the next big quake somewhere on the west coast will test the premise that eight hours is enough, when fuel delivery becomes compromised, as I guess Sandy has already done on the east coast

As part of that evaluation, could hybrid natural gas/diesel gensets rise to the fore as a solution? I haven't done enough research to know if a nat gas/diesel can also be operated on diesel alone, but I would think it could be.

The downside of course is paying for the natural gas service (probably a pretty hefty upfront capital cost as well as stiff "standby" charges from the utility). And as protection in the earthquake scenario, maybe not worth it.

But if you talked to any of the "bucket brigade" team members at Squarespace, reducing their fuel load by 85% would have been a blessing indeed.

SVLG DC Summit: Server Room/Closet Efficiency

As you might expect, I thought that the panel session I moderated at the SVLG DC EE Summit was the best, though I will concede it wasn't the best attended!

Our topic was driving energy efficiency in the server room and closet segment, and we started off with a presentation from Bill Tschudi from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who shared what they found after auditing a dozen or so server rooms in a diverse customer group.

Bill noted that there were good low-cost opportunities for improvement at every site they surveyed and that the penetration of virtualization/consolidation was very low. LBNL has issued a three-page guide noting fourteen energy efficiency technologies and measures for server rooms (I was on the team that wrote it.)

Next was Shalini Singh, a project manager at Stanford University, who described how they tackled energy use at two of their over fifty server rooms.  In one case, the six or so racks of equipment will move from a server room with a PUE of over two to one of their data centers where the PUE is in the 1.4 range, saving over $100,000 a year in power costs.

In the second server room, supporting facility operations, the room will stay in place but a virtualization/consolidation program is under way that should address existing cooling issues.

Last but not least was Pierre Delforge from the Natural Resources Defense Council, who gave us a look at the opportunity nationally (we could save the equivalent of 250 MW of generation resources if we capture cost-effective measures), and touted our work at proposing a utility program design to address this market.

Participation from the attendees was good, with a strong acknowledgement that the opportunity is very real, but a challenge to address. Pierre and I are still working with utilities who are interested in running a program pilot, and we're also looking for IT service providers who would be interested in supporting such an effort.