Unlike your home computer, the servers running in the cloud need to be online 24/7, and running at full speed. You don’t want to have to wait for somebody to boot the server every time you try to access you favourite web site!

With all those racks of computers running at full power all the time, extracting heat and keeping the servers at safe temperatures is one of the biggest problems a data centre faces. Typical data centres run redundant HVAC systems. In the same way that a server that fails needs a backup that can take over transparently, the cooling system in the building needs to have a backup. All that cooling takes energy.

Liquid Cooling
Liquid cooling systems for home PCs, typically aimed at the hard core gaming community, have been around for a while. They are typically replacement heat sinks for the CPU, and sometimes the graphics card, that have cooled water pumped through them. Not ideal for use in a large data centre environment with thousands of rack mounted PCs.

A new idea though changes the cooling fluid to a non-conductive mineral oil, and completely submerge the rack in it. The efficiency of the liquid at removing heat from the systems is much better than cooled air over the fins of a heat sink. Green Revolution Cooling claims their GreenDEF™ based system can save over 90% on cooling energy usage, and 50% on total energy usage (cooler running servers are also more efficient).

Better still, it is much easier to recover the heat energy from a liquid like mineral oil than it is with a conventional air cooling system. So that energy you want out of the data centre’s computer rooms can be used to keep the operator’s control room and any office spaces comfortable when it gets cold outside.

Downsides?
The most obvious problem with submerging your rack, or even individual slices, in mineral oil has to be the added complexity of making any changes to the hardware, or replacing it when it fails. Hopefully, for the operators at least, the more even cooling will help extend the life of the components enough that replacements are rare.

This morning I was sent a link to an amazing collection of art by Chris Jordan called Running The Numbers. The thumbnail of the detail view to the right really doesn’t do it justice either – you have to see the full size image to understand exactly what this image is. What it represents is 28,000 42-gallon oil drum: the amount of oil consumed in the US every 2 minutes.

And then keep looking at the other images in the collection. Others that stood out for me were:

• One hundred million toothpicks, representing the number of trees cut down to support the junk mail business (what a total waste);
• One million plastic cups: the number used on US airlines every 6 hours;
• Two million plastic bottles: the number used in the US every 5 minutes (that’s an amazing 576 million bottles a day!);
• 426,000 cell phones being “retired” every day in the US (most probably still working perfectly);
• 1.14 million brown paper bags: the number used every hour in the US;
• And finally, 60,000 plastic bags: the number used every 5 seconds in the US (that is over 1 billion every day).

In addition to the environmental issues represented by these numbers I’ve highlighted, there are also other social issues in the collection, including an image representing smoking, healthcare and even the issue of prisoners, both in the US and in US run detention facilities outside the US.

Light Bulbs

One image though I have a slight disagreement with: the image of 320,000 light bulbs floating in space. Said to be equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.). The issue I have with this statement is that it is missing the real solution to this problem. The solution is not for consumers to unplug everything. The solution requires two parts:

1. More equipment designed to really use a lot less power when in sleep mode;
2. More electricity being generated from clean and renewable sources.

The second of those is perhaps the most important. Once we can produce enough electricity from clean renewable resources, why shouldn’t we use it to make our quality of life better? Sure, cutting consumption helps keep the bills low, and in the short term, while the world still depends heavily on dirty coal, and other non-renewable resources for our electricity, will help reduce emissions. But the logical extrapolation of that argument is to say that we should just stop using electricity completely. That’s a stupid argument. Much better to talk about how we can use technology to bring our clean generation levels in line with our consumption needs. Sure, don’t waste electricity unnecessarily, but the Vertography position is one of moderation. Sleep mode, done correctly, is a useful compromise, and better than just leaving the kit on all the time!

Unlike developed nations, many of the places where this technology was designed to be deployed lack electricity, so the Green Wi-Fi project designed a self-contained unit consisting of a solar panel, charge controller and battery for power, and a modified Linksys WRT54GL wireless router with a high gain external omni-directional antenna for the internet access part. These boxes form the nodes of a self-healing mesh network. Connect one or more of them to the internet somehow (often via a cellular modem) and you can share that connection across the entire mesh. Since the boxes need no external power, they can be placed on rooftops anywhere to build up the mesh.

Got Wi-Fi, Now What?
Having a solar powered Wi-Fi mesh alone doesn’t get you much, so what else is needed to make this useful? Well, the most obvious thing that is needed next is computers, and the OLPC project’s XO laptop makes a perfect device for use with the mesh Wi-Fi network. The team at Green Wi-Fi have also developed solar charging solutions for these little laptops, allowing a school to have a collection of them which can be charged using a panel mounted on the roof of the school building.

Bruce Baikie, Green Wi-Fi’s CEO, just returned from a trip to Senegal along with a group of high school volunteers from San Francisco, where they delivered 25 OLPC laptops to the village school, and installed a 60W solar charging station for them too. The US high school students also trained the village’s teachers how to use and maintain the new laptops, as well as helping to repair school rooms, desks, the village health clinic, bathrooms, roofs, and anything else they could help with. Later this year Bruce will be returning to install a Wi-Fi mesh (they currently have just a single network connection provided by a very power-hungry, and somewhat unreliable, CDMA modem).

Photos from Senegal

[Senegal photos with thanks from Bruce Baikie @ Green Wi-Fi.]

While I was out the other day I came across a couple of solutions for charging portable devices, like iPods & media players, iPhones and other mobile phones, GPS navigation units or portable gaming devices using the energy of the sun. The two models I saw in the store were the Solio Universal Hybrid Solar Charger and the Solio H1000 Hybrid Battery Charger.

Of the two, the H1000 was perhaps the most appealing to me, simply because I’m not such a big fan of the fan out operation on the other model. Both have an internal battery that is charged by the solar panel, and can then be used to charge your external device. That means you can leave the charger in a sunny place all day, and then top up your phone from it overnight. And using solar power instead of leaving the phone’s AC charger plugged in all day, reduces the phantom power drain too (unplugging that AC adapter when you’re not using will help there too).

In PolyFuel’s prototype, the power supply features a detachable fuel cartridge – about the size of a deck of cards – that can be swapped out while the computer continues to run. Long-distance travelers, or others needing continuous, unconnected, easily portable power for their notebooks, would simply carry spare cartridges in their pocket or purse – a someday common practice that has already been approved for commercial aircraft by the various regulatory bodies around the world.

What are the Advantages?

From an environmental perspective, a methanol fuel cell is a much better technology than the lithium ion batteries we use today. Methanol is a renewable fuel, and the cells can be made from biodegradable or easily recycled materials. While the batteries in today’s laptops can be recycled, it is a much more costly process.

But, as with many things green, the methanol fuel cell has other advantages over the batteries it replaces: with current technology, they last three times longer than a lithium ion battery; in the future that may increase to as much as 10 times. They are also much lighter than batteries, so the traveling worker now has a power source that will last for a long haul flight, and make the hand luggage lighter (that alone is a big deal if you travel regularly with a laptop!). Since they’re also refillable rather than rechargeable, should it run out mid flight you just need to swap the methanol cartridge to keep working.

Disadvantages?

Well, like any new technology there are likely to be some issues for the early adopters. Getting through security checks at the airport with a new feature like this might take some patience (ask the folks with the solid state drive version of the Mac Air).

Being away from home and running out of methanol might be a problem too. Plugging in for a recharge is usually possible today where ever you are likely to find yourself with a laptop, but buying replacement methanol cartridges might be harder, especially when you get in at midnight after a delayed flight.

As this technology becomes more common though, these problems will go away and we’ll all be enjoying laptops that last for days on a lightweight power source.

[Via GreenUpgrader]