Cluttr dials down data center energy on demand

Data centers don’t have to be powered by a solar farm, or cooled by seawater, to be smart about their energy consumption — often times it’s the far less glamorous choices that can lead to big energy savings. And those are the choices that Belgian startup Cluttr is looking to help data center operators make.

The company, which was one of the LaunchPad finalists for GigaOM Structure last week, has developed software and a service that takes a deep dive into a data center’s energy use and makes it a whole lot smarter. The startup, founded by entrepreneur Frederik Van Hecke when he was studying at the Ghent University, audits an existing facility, provides its Power Waste Reduction (PWR) suite of software, and monitors everything to make sure the facility is reducing its energy use.

The software manages the data center’s power use in real time. When there’s less load on the servers (say it’s the middle of the night), the software dials down the energy use, and when the load turns back up, the software adjusts in real time. The company describes this as enabling “the power consumption to actually scale along with the amount of work being processed.” Silicon Valley startup Power Assurehas developed a similar type of software.

Van Hecke tells me that the amount of energy, and money, that can be saved via the software depends on the type of workloads that the servers do. But generally, Van Hecke says, Cluttr is seeing energy reductions ranging from 20 up to 40 percent — that’s a savings of $300 to $600 per server per year based on European electricity prices, and $115 to $230 per server per year based on U.S. electricity prices, says Van Hecke. The company’s audit tool helps them estimate the potential savings for a customer before actually deploying the solution. More

 

Work Starts On Fossil Fuel Free Cargo Ship

With rising fossil fuel prices and the global challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this project is set to change the shipping industry by providing efficient and affordable low-carbon shipping. The project combines proven technology, using the state of the art dyna-rig sail propulsion system with an off the shelf Rolls-Royce engine powered by waste derived liquid biomethane (liquid gas).

The ships are being developed by B9 Shipping, part of the B9 Energy group of companies, which has started work on a full-scale demonstration vessel validating the engineering and economic assumptions of the initial vessel design.

The fundamental testing programme is being conducted at the University of Southampton's Wolfson Unit for Marine Technology and Industrial Aerodynamics (WUMTIA), which has provided innovative marine technology and industrial aerodynamics expertise for over 40 years to a world-wide customer base.

Diane Gilpin, Director of B9 Shipping, says: "The shipping sector is a highly complex, interconnected system and our task has been to develop relationships with key players across the industry. Having worked previously with WUMTIA, I believe this collaboration will enable a robust, commercially and technically viable solution to be ready for scale once the engineering is proven."

Kevin Forshaw, Industry Liaison for the newly formed Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute (SMMI) at the University of Southampton, says: "Helping to develop viable means of propulsion for shipping in a post-carbon economy is a strategic objective for SMMI, and the B9 concept offers a viable alternative that we will be seeking to support at every opportunity.''

The testing programme, which begins in June, will undertake tow tank and wind tunnel research to identify a basic hull design and how it interacts with the dyna-rig system. It will examine various options in the performance parameters of a B9 Ship in scale model, calibrating the thrust from the sailing rig with various hull shapes to secure optimum performance efficiencies in a wide range of meteorological and sea conditions, whilst delivering against the essential commercial (loading and discharge; port constraints) aspects. More

 

Shortages: Is 'peak oil' idea dead?

Since humans found that oil was better than coal for shifting vehicles, people have fretted over oil wells running dry.

Bouts of anxiety are periodic. In the seventies a Shell geoscientist, M King Hubbert, sounded an alarm that supplies would peak by 1995 "if current trends continue."

They didn't peak. Fear is a powerful motivator and forecasting a shortage can be a good way of avoiding one.

Instead of seeing the 1970s oil crisis end in a long-term shortage, we responded by developing more fuel-efficient cars and burning less oil for heating. And what's more, oil production continued to grow.

Shortages: Resources running out

Fisheries on the slide

Water supplies in crisis

The latest bout of worry over oil supplies was provoked by a series of events in the 2000s, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, the Iraq War and an unfortunate incident in which Shell's chairman resigned after the firm overstated its oil reserves by 250 million barrels.

It all disturbed President George W Bush. And his fears over energy security brought him into alignment with Tony Blair, who was pressing to combat climate change. The two agendas fortuitously converged - for a while - in the shape of home-grown energy sources like renewables and nuclear.

And by 2006 it looked as though the oil doomsters were being proved right.

Production actually fell, and by 2008 the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security began warning that an oil shortage could destabilise economic, political and social activity potentially by 2015. More

 

Japan approves renewable subsidies in shift from nuclear power

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan approved on Monday incentives for renewable energy that could unleash billions of dollars in clean-energy investment and help the world's third-biggest economy shift away from a reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster.

Industry Minister Yukio Edano approved the introduction of feed-in tariffs (FIT), which means higher rates will be paidTOKYO (Reuters) - Japan approved on Monday incentives for renewable energy that could unleash billions of dollars in clean-energy investment and help the world's third-biggest economy shift away from a reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster.


Industry Minister Yukio Edano approved the introduction of feed-in tariffs (FIT), which means higher rates will be paid for renewable energy. The move could expand revenue from renewable generation and related equipment to more than $30 billion by 2016, brokerage CLSA estimates.

The subsidies from July 1 are one of the few certainties in Japan's energy landscape, where the government has gone back to the drawing board to write a power policy after the Fukushima radiation crisis, the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The push for renewables is aimed at cutting reliance on not only nuclear, but pricey oil and liquefied natural gas for energy needs.

The scheme requires Japanese utilities to buy electricity from renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal at pre-set premiums for up to 20 years. Costs will be passed on to consumers through higher bills. for renewable energy. The move could expand revenue from renewable generation and related equipment to more than $30 billion by 2016, brokerage CLSA estimates.

The subsidies from July 1 are one of the few certainties in Japan's energy landscape, where the government has gone back to the drawing board to write a power policy after the Fukushima radiation crisis, the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The push for renewables is aimed at cutting reliance on not only nuclear, but pricey oil and liquefied natural gas for energy needs.

The scheme requires Japanese utilities to buy electricity from renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal at pre-set premiums for up to 20 years. Costs will be passed on to consumers through higher bills. More

 

Hydropower Continues Steady Growth

World hydroelectric power generation has risen steadily by an average 3 percent annually over the past four decades. In 2011, at 3,500 billion kilowatt-hours, hydroelectricity accounted for roughly 16 percent of global electricity generation, almost all produced by the world’s 45,000-plus large dams. Today hydropower is generated in over 160 countries.

Four countries dominate the hydropower landscape: China, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Together they produce more than half of the world’s hydroelectricity.

Much of the world’s recent growth came from China, where hydropower generation more than tripled from 220 billion kilowatt-hours in 2000 to 720 billion in 2010. In 2011, despite a drop in generation due to drought, hydropower accounted for 15 percent of China’s total electricity generation.

Brazil, the second-largest producer of hydropower worldwide, gets 86 percent of its electricity from water resources. It is home to an estimated 450 dams, including the Itaipu Dam, which generates more electricity than any other hydropower facility in the world—over 92 billion kilowatt-hours per year. More

 

The new hotness in energy storage: gravel

Can a humble system of gravel and a heat pump provide a breakthrough for utility-scale energy storage? British startupIsentropic thinks so, and this week announced that they’ve raised $22 million in project funding and an equity investment from the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), a collaboration between the U.K. government and companies in the energy industry.

I covered Isentropic back in 2009, and back then the company was looking for a $5 million Series B round. The five-year-old company, previously raised a Series A round from Credit Suisse Securities Europe and won a £250,000 ($380,112) research grant from The Carbon Trust.

The innovation behind Isentropic’s idea is an advanced heat pump connected to a super simple, low cost energy storage design. Heat pumps are basically engines that can work in reverse and Isentropic’s device can store and release energy when needed. Founders and engineers Jon Howes and James Macnaghten developed the design of the heat pump a decade ago, and then brought on Mark Wagner as chairman to help with business direction.

An isentropic process (hence the name) is a thermodynamic process that can be reversed. Chairman Mark Wagner told me back in 2009 that the key to the company’s heat pump is that it can be reversed extremely efficiently, and has an isentropic efficiency (reversible efficiency) of 99 percent. More





 

Pre-feasibility report: Islamabad asks WB to weigh up power import from India

ISLAMABAD: The World Bank has begun preparing a pre-feasibility report to assess the viability of Pakistan importing power from India under the Pakistan Regional Trade Programme, a senior water ministry official told The Express Tribune.

The World Bank’s initiative comes in light of the request made by Pakistan to provide technical assistance to conduct a pre-feasibility study regarding the import of power and exploring interconnection options between the power systems of both nations.

The study will help Pakistan in identifying issues and important risks of the proposed interconnection and electricity trade. It will be evaluated by a committee of experts from the National Transmission Dispatch Company and the Ministry of Water and Power. The official said negotiations among various stakeholders regarding the possibility of interconnecting power grids are ongoing.

Pakistan had decided in April that it would import up to 500 megawatts of electricity from India with the World Bank agreeing to fund construction of the required infrastructure. “We will import 500MW from India initially. Import can be increased up to 5,000MW if our need so demands,” said the ministry official.

No transmission link currently exists between India and Pakistan. It was decided earlier that the countries will build a 45-kilometre, 220 kilovolt transmission line within six months of signing a formal agreement. The agreement will be valid for five years, after which it can be extended for another five years. More



 

The biggest climate victory you never heard of

The fight against coal in the US has achieved great success due to activists' passion and commitment.

San Francisco, CA - Coal is going down in the United States, and that's good news for the Earth's climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012. That amounts to a staggering 20 per cent decline from one year earlier. And the EIA anticipates additional decline by year's end, suggesting a historic setback for coal, which has provided the majority of the US' electricity for many decades.

Even more encouraging, however, is the largely unknown story behind coal's retreat. Mainstream media coverage has credited low prices for natural gas - coal's chief competitor - and the Obama administration's March 27 announcement of stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. And certainly both of those developments played a role.

But a third factor - a persistent grassroots citizens' rebellion that has blocked the construction of 166 (and counting) proposed coal-fired power plants - has been at least as important. At the very time when President Obama's "cap-and-trade" climate legislation was going down in flames in Washington, local activists across the United States were helping to impose "a de facto moratorium on new coal", in the words of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, one of the first analysts to note the trend.

"If the activists hadn't been there talking to the government regulators and newspaper editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet, the plants would have gone forward."

Another surprise: most of these coal plants were defeated in the politically red states of the South and Midwest. Victories were coming "in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you'd expect environmental victories", recalls Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, which provided national coordination for the local efforts. The victories in Oklahoma were particularly sweet, coming in the home state of Capitol Hill's leading climate denier, Senator James Inhofe.

Of course the activists had help: the falling cost of natural gas and a decline in electricity demand following the 2008 financial collapse made coal vulnerable. But it was grassroots activism that turned this vulnerability into outright defeat, argues Thomas Sanzillo, a former deputy comptroller for the New York state government who has collaborated with Beyond Coal. "If the activists hadn't been there talking to government regulators and newspaper editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet," Sanzillo explains, "the plants would have gone forward, because the utility companies would say, ‘We can handle the costs,' and those [government] boards are often good ol' boy boards." More