Mark Bramfitt - Utilities & IT

See You At Datacenter Dynamics New York, March 11th

I'll be supporting the power and cooling track which is sponsored by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and moderating a panel discussion looking at meaningful metrics for computing efficiency.

I recommend DCD conferences to utility clients as they are a great way to get a quick immersion in the industry with just a one day commitment, at a location likely pretty near you (Atlanta, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, and Dallas).

If you're heading to New York, check out the track and the panel session!

Attending: Technology Convergence Conference February 18th

Happy to note that I'll be prowling the sessions at Teladata's Technology Convergence Conference next week in Santa Clara, looking out for industry trends in general and anything that hits the utility and data center industry nexus. (No speaking or panel moderation duties this time around!)

The TCC events are really a great way for me to catch up industry players, hear from vendors, and broaden my horizons a bit beyond just energy efficiency issues. I've learned a lot about other aspects of data center infrastructure - a perspective absent from most other events.

It's a great credit to Teladata to put these events since 2007. 

Check out the agenda here, and of course I'll report on interesting revelations in this space later next week.

EPA Utility Data Center EE Program Guide Webinar Thursday

Our bi-monthly webinar providing an overview of the EPA's "Understanding and Designing Energy Efficiency Programs For Data Centers" is this Thursday at 1 pm EST.

Check here at the EPA's web site to register for the webinar, and to get a copy of the guide.

As I mentioned on the AESP webinar two weeks ago, this is a chance to get a rather more extended overview of the guide given that we have an hour instead of just twenty minutes.

EPA Webinar: Utility Data Center EE Program Design

We've been holding monthly webinars on behalf of the EPA to describe how to design and manage utility energy efficiency programs for the data center market, and our next session is coming up after Thanksgiving on December 5th (register here).

The one-hour webinar is a great way to get acclimated to the fifteen-page guide that the EPA has published on the subject.

We are working on an update to the guide to cover new construction program opportunities as well as providing an update on program planning for the server room and small data center market. Utilities on the west coast are actively studying this market with an eye towards debuting programs in 2014.

Also note at the registration site that the EPA has two other webinar series that would be of interest to data center and IT managers; one on desktop power management and the other on data center energy efficiency opportunities.

EUCI Philadelphia: New DC Trends Presentation

I delivered three presentations at the "Data Centers and Utilities" session hosted by EUCI in Philadelphia late last month, and my opening session was significantly updated from the same conference held in San Francisco last year.

I must admit that I had to think on my feet for all three presentations, as the dozen-and-a-half participants were all from utilities (no data center operators or developers were there). And not only that, these weren't utility energy efficiency program managers, they were to a person involved in economic development activities.

Three utilities delivered presentations on the programs they have developed to try to attract data center development in their service areas:

• The Tennessee Valley Authority (a wholesale energy provider) described how they had worked with their utility customers and local authorities to identify and qualify about fifty prime sites in the seven-state region they cover. The information package they have for each site is really impressive, as well as the work they've done with electric planning engineers to identify available power capacity.

• American Electric Power (which has several utilities under it's corporate umbrella) has done about the same level of work, though they have identified only nine sites so far.

• And local utility PECO (an Exelon company) described how they were working with existing data centers in the greater Philadelphia region to help them expand in the area.

In my opening presentation, I noted that data center developers are looking for just a few key attributes when making a site selection: current and future power costs, power availability, and time to market (how long it takes to get the infrastructure in place).

I did point out that there are a handful of operators who are acutely interested in carbon content, but that most developers are interested in that topic only as a determinate of future power prices.

Perhaps the most interesting connection I made for the industry move to utility-scale data centers is that these facilities have several underlying cost advantages compared to enterprise facilities, with many of them representing a two-to-one or greater edge.

For example, these centers can be twice as efficient as legacy enterprise centers, and be located in areas where utilities are half as expensive as urban coastal areas. When you compound the inherent underlying cost advantages, you can predict an inexorable move to utility scale facilities offering hosting or cloud services.

Here's the presentation:

Download EUCI 7 13 Opening Sess

 

Speaking At...EUCI Data Centers and Utilities, Philadelphia, July 23 and 24

I'll be reprising my presentations at the EUCI Data Centers and Utilities conference in Philadelphia in late July, though happily we've condensed the four presentations I gave at their last conference into two slots at the beginning of each day.

I've posted three of the four slide decks from EUCI's last conference, but will of course be updating all of my materials based on recent market trends and some new topic areas. (I do my best to track the questions at conferences to inform presentation updates, as well as feedback that I get from program evaluations.)

GSMI Green Data Center Conference Presentation Deck

I took a quick trip to the outskirts of Dallas last week to deliver one of two keynote addresses at the GSMI Green Data Center Conference, focusing my remarks on the intersections of the data center and utility industries.

My remarks covered not only the utility and energy factors inherent in making a siting decison for a new data center, but why energy issues will be increasingly important for IT managers even for existing operations.

The concluding theme was that the IT industry and utilities have more to do with each other than ever, and that there are opportunities to partner on energy efficiency and perhaps load management and self generation. And for the big players, a need for them to help guide and influence energy policy and regulations, given the importance of the grid in supporting their business vision.

ASs I noted in an earlier post, it was gratifying to get insightful questions about energy policy in the final few minutes of my time slot, as well as good one-on-one discussions afterwards!

Here's a copy of the deck:

Download GSMI GDCON Dallas 6 2013

The Future of Nuclear Power in the US

Probably a couple of quick posts that react to discussions I had after my presentation at the GSMI Green Data Center Conference in Dallas last week...

You never know what questions you'll get at the end of a presentation, and after delivering a presentation describing how utilities and the data center and IT industries are becoming increasingly intertwined, I was pleased to get more questions about utility regulatory policy than on data center issues.

One of the questions, which generated quite a bit of ongoing discussion, was why the US is not building nuclear power plants as a means of addressing climate change, and energy security and availability.

My short answer is that beyond technical issues and even siting concerns, regulatory policy in the US precludes utilities or merchant generators from developing power plants of all types. Simply put, it's hard to finance what are often multi-billion dollar projects without regulatory assurance that cost recovery in rates will happen.

We've seen that in California, where our regulatory commission is allowing the investor-owned utilities back into the power generation business becasue the private market was abandoning projects mid-stream, and certainly not building enough capacity to meet projected needs.

This article from today's New York Times describes the only current nuclear power plant project in the US, describing the regulatory challenges as well as the headwinds of cheap natural gas and falling prices for renewable generation (notably wind, not solar).

One of the central points of my presentation was that power portfolios in the US are getting cleaner, but that is coming at a cost. For data center developers, understanding the future price for power at a given utility is as important as knowing the current costs. Utilities that have to move to cleaner power portfolios are going to see the largest percentage rate hikes.

EUCI Presentation III: Environmental Considerations for DC Siting

This is the third of four(!) presentations I delivered at an EUCI data center forum in December in San Francisco, and I've just committed to attend their second conference on this subject in Philadelphia in June (details posted when available).

With a mixed audience of data center developers, utilities, and consultants, it was an interesting place to deliver some forthright commentary on the environmental consequences of siting large data center developments:  Download EUCI Presentation 3

On one hand, utilities like attracting these loads, but don't necessarily like to reveal the carbon content of their power. On the other side, where a utility-scale data center is located is the single most important criteria for the environmental impact of the facility, and seeking cheap rates usually means sourcing dirtier power.

On the carbon content point, I noted in the presentation that utilities are pretty lax in reporting the sources for their power. In California, there was a pretty good mandatory framework imposed by the state that has unfortunately been watered down somewhat (utilities can put all of their purchased power in an "other" category, making an often large chunk of their portfolio invisible to consumers).

The other key issue is that the carbon content varies utility-by-utility, even in the same geographical region. I charted California utilities in a white paper (link to your left) and found that municipal providers in California are often providing much dirtier power supplies than the investor-owned utilities.

The cheaper-is-dirtier paradigm doesn't hold in all cases. I cite the Pacific Northwest where some data center operators have been able to get utility power almost wholly reliant on large hydroelectric plants at very low rates, and the surprising amounts of nuclear and more recently even renewables in parts of the country like Virginia where coal has always been king.

My message to data center operators considering locations for new developments is to be sure they know what they are getting from the local utility, and to consider the risks of price increases going forward. States are imposing renewable energy requirments that will lead to greater rate impacts in areas of the country with low use of renewables, compared to other states that are meeting established targets.

For both audiences, I pointed out that regulators and NGOs like Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council are watching, as well as the mainstream press, a la the series of articles published recently by the New York Times.

 

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.