(task) Daily Report: More Clean Energy, Brought to You by the Cloud - The New York Times

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> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/technology/daily-report-more-clean-energy-brought-to-you-by-the-cloud.html?mabReward=A5&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/technology/daily-report-more-clean-energy-brought-to-you-by-the-cloud.html?mabReward=A5&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine>
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> Daily Report: More Clean Energy, Brought to You by the Cloud
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> A construction worker helps install solar panels at a solar energy plant run by First Solar, near Cholame, Calif. Apple will buy the energy generated at the plant to power its stores in California. Andrew Burton for The New York Times
> The cloud, as it turns out, may have a very green lining.
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> As Diane Cardwell report <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/business/energy-environment/as-energy-use-rises-corporations-turn-to-their-own-green-utility-sources.html>s <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/business/energy-environment/as-energy-use-rises-corporations-turn-to-their-own-green-utility-sources.html>, Apple <http://www.nytimes.com/topic/company/apple-incorporated?inline=nyt-org> is trying to meet its growing needs for electricity with green sources like solar, wind and hydroelectric <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hydroelectric_power/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> power.
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> A prime reason for this is the growing demand from its cloud computing centers, where Apple keeps its customers’ music, photos and much more.
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> On this front, Apple joins a number of other cloud providers, who collectively may change the face of energy production by increasing demand for renewable energy.
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> Big cloud-computing companies are building facilities on an unparalleled scale, and at a time when few others are increasing demand. Dominion Virginia Power, which supplies perhaps the world’s greatest concentration of data centers, reported that overall demand rose 1 percent last year, but demand from data centers rose 9 percent.
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> Even as they take up more of the grid, the big cloud companies don’t want to be seen as big polluters. In 2011 Greenpeace published a report <http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2011/Cool%20IT/dirty-data-report-greenpeace.pdf> on the energy policies of data centers that in particular slammed Amazon Web Services, the biggest and fastest-growing of the cloud companies.
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> Continue reading the main story
> Amazon Web Services has since committed to obtaining 100 percent of its power from renewable sources. Last year the company purchased a 250,000-panel, 80-megawatt plant in Virginia, which it later sold to Dominion.
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> Other data centers have long been situated near big dams, which provide cheap as well as green power. Lots of building is happening in Iowa, Texas and elsewhere in America’s great wind corridor, to encourage the construction of more wind-driven facilities.
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> Remote locations have other benefits. “When your nearest neighbor is 100 acres away, you don’t get as many complaints about the power lines,” said Joe Kava, who heads Google’s data center operations.
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> There are signs it is affecting the way utilities plan future construction. American Electric Power, which operates in 11 states, has said it will add 6,300 megawatts of new wind power and 3,100 megawatts of new solar generation before 2033. An AEP official told me that much of this was attributable to demand from data centers.
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> For many of these companies, it’s not just about saving the planet; power has moved from an incidental cost to a main determinant of profitability. Like nothing else, that has affected the operation of data centers in ways that may improve other big companies’ power consumption.
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> The traditional measure of data center efficiency is power usage effectiveness, or P.U.E. This measures how much power goes into a data center and how much of that is used by computing equipment. For a poorly run center, this number can be 2.0 or higher, meaning it takes two watts of power to put one watt into a computer.
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> Facebook <http://www.nytimes.com/topic/company/facebook-inc?inline=nyt-org>’s data center in Prineville, Ore., by comparison, has a P.U.E. of 1.1 or less, and even posts <https://www.facebook.com/PrinevilleDataCenter/app/399244020173259> how well it is doing. Google and others now report similar numbers.
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> Google has also applied its artificial intelligence skills to the problem, and it recently announced <https://deepmind.com/blog> that by predicting demand it could reduce its P.U.E. overhead by 15 percent.
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> Google said this kind of technique could be used by other industries, and is likely to be something it sells <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/technology/google-races-to-catch-up-in-cloud-computing.html> as a service from its cloud business.
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> Continue reading the main story
> Together, these companies are building with their clouds a new kind of industrial infrastructure. It would be something if it also reshaped our power usage for the better.