Apple is building a 100-acre solar farm to help power its massive data center in Maiden, North Carolina. But Amazon data-center guru James Hamilton questions whether this actually makes sense.
In a recent blog post, Hamilton — who also served as a data center architect at Microsoft — asks whether such solar farms are “really somewhere between a bad idea and pure marketing, where the environmental impact is purely optical.”
The Amazon man takes a close look at the solar array Apple is building beside its North Carolina data center — which helps drive the company’s fledgling iCloud service — as well as a smaller array already in use at Facebook’s new data center in Prineville, Oregon. “I’m really developing serious reservations that this is the path to reducing data center environmental impact,” he writes. “I just can’t make the math work.”
In short, Hamilton argues that a solar farm would have to be ridiculously large in order to significantly reduce the strain that these massive computing facilities put on the environment. Even Apple’s solar farm, he says, takes up too much land — and by his estimates, it will provide the data center will only about four percent of the power it requires.
Apple and Facebook are just two of the many web giants building a new breed of data center that consumes less power than traditional facilities and treats the planet with a little more respect. Google and Facebook have made particular strides in this area — and apparently, Amazon has too. But Hamilton believes that this revolution has little do to with solar.
Facebook’s solar farm is rated at 100 kilowatts, but Hamilton estimates that often overcast skies in the Oregonian high desert deliver only 13.75 kilowatts — about 0.055 percent of the total power needed by the data center. “It might run the lights in the data center but it has almost no measurable possible impact on the overall energy consumed,” he says. “Although this is pointed to as an environmentally conscious decisions, it really has close to no influence on the overall environmental impact of this facility.”
Actually, it does only the run lights. Facebook said as much when we visited the data center this past fall, and a company spokesman reaffirms that the solar farm was never meant to do more. “The initial intent was as an experiment — to see what kind of impact could be made with a small installation,” he says. “The fact that it powers the lights is a bonus; mostly we installed it to see what we could learn.”
But Hamilton’s ultimate point is that if you did build a solar farm large enough to provide most of the power for such a facility, it would be significantly larger than the data center itself. Though Apple is building is a 20-megawatt solar farm in North Carolina, Hamilton points out, it’s still providing only a fraction of the power needed to run Apple’s data center. If you wanted to power the entire 500,000-square-foot facility, he estimates, you’d need a 181-million-square-feet solar farm.
“There are many ways to radically reduce aggregate data center environmental impact without as much land consumption,” he says. “Personally, I look first to increasing the efficiency of power distribution, cooling, storage, networking and server and increasing overall utilization the best routes to lowering industry environmental impact.”
That may very well be the case. But let’s not forget that a data center solar farm makes for a much nicer headline.
Source : Wired
