Green Wombat

photo originally uploaded by Ko(char *)hoo
A group of Fresno, Calif., businessmen and farmers a few months back formed a group to push for the construction of a nuclear power plant in the state’s Central Valley, in part, as a solution to global warming. On Thursday, California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey weighed in on the issue. "It’s a non-starter," said Peevey of the nuke plant proposal, during a press conference at utility PG&E (PCG) before a panel on solar energy began. Peevey, a former utility company executive, said there’s no getting around a California law that bans new nuclear power plant construction in the Golden State until a way is found to dispose of radioactive waste. "That’s not to say there is not a role for nuclear energy in climate change. But it is not going to happen in California."  Peevey acknowledged as a "Herculean challenge" a California mandate that utilities PG&E, Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) must get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2030. With PG&E executives standing beside him, he said he’d like to see the utility earn a guaranteed rate of return on capital invested in rooftop solar collectors. "I would also like to see them invest in solar thermal" power plants, Peevey added.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist and green energy guru Vinod Khosla also spoke at the press conference, calling for a carbon tax on fossil fuels to reflect their environmental costs and level the playing field with renewable energy producers.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

photo originally uploaded by 77008

Want to help stop global warming? Kill your web TV. An authoritative study released today on the power consumption of servers – those high-powered computers that run the Internet, deliver millions of YouTube videos and keep the post-industrial economy humming – found that their electricity use doubled between 2000 and 2005 and could spike another 75 percent by 2010. To put it another way, in 2005 it took the equivalent of 14, 1,000-megawatt power plants to keep online the world’s data centers owned by Internet giants like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO). Server farms in the United States alone consumed enough electricity to keep five of those monster power plants running around the clock. And that was before the explosion of online video and the use of the Internet as a global telephone service. "You can imagine there be will be substantial improvements in the operation of data centers in the next five years, but you can also can imagine there will many new applications coming out leading to demand for servers we didn’t expect," study author and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey told Green Wombat. (Download his report here.) In the study funded by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) – which sells energy-efficient server chips – Koomey used server sales data supplied by market research firm IDC to estimate the computers’ worldwide power use. He found that by 2005 server farms consumed 1.2 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. The utility bill: $2.7 billion.

The X factor in the server power equation is Google. The search behemoth custom-builds most of its servers from off the shelf parts. That means its data centers don’t appear on IDC’s map.  So Koomey relied on a 2006 New York Times report that
estimated that Google operates 450,000 servers. That would increase the number of servers worldwide by 1.7 percent. "I don’t think the Google factor is that important for this study," says Koomey. The future may be another matter, however. With its acquisition of YouTube, which serves up hundreds of millions of videos, and its pursuit of such initiatives as digitalizing university libraries, there’s no end in sight to Google’s data center building boom. (photo at right by skreuzer.)

The report is sure to intensify efforts by AMD, Sun Microsystems (SUNW) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to claim the green ground as the purveyors of energy efficient technology.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

The U.S. Department of Energy today released its annual "state energy profiles," which present a number-packed but revealing look at the divergent paths being taken by the nation’s two largest states, California and Texas, in the age of global warming. On the green path is the Golden State, home to 36.1 million people in 2005 – nearly 1 in 10 U.S. residents.  Taking the brown road is  Texas, with a population of 22.9 million. Despite its size California’s per capital energy consumption ranks 46 out of the 50 states. Texans, on the other hand, are power hogs, with the state the 5th biggest consumer of energy. Texas produces 10.2 percent of the country’s coal-fired electricity; California a tenth of 1 percent. California, however, generates the most power from solar, wind and other non-hydro sources, accounting for about 26 percent of the U.S.’s renewable energy. Texas’ share is about 6 percent. The Lone Star State does whip the Left Coast when it comes to wind power. With 1,600 wind farms in just west Texas, the state is the nation’s biggest wind-power generator. (Update: Southern California Edison on Thursday announced it has signed the nation’s largest wind energy deal, an agreement to buy 1,500 megawatts from wind farms to be built in the Tehachapi region by Australian wind power company Alta Windpower Development.) Still, no surprise that Texas emits 10.3 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide from electricity generation while California is responsible for 2.2 percent.

So what gives? It’s tempting make this a Blue State-Red State thing – you know, Toyota (TM) Prius-driving, solar-powered San Francisco vegans versus Hummer-lovin’, Halliburton (HAL) -stock-owning Houstonians. Sure, cultural predilections play a role but this is more about geology and policy. Texas holds 23 percent of the country’s crude oil reserves, California has 16 percent; Texas has 4 percent of coal reserves, California zip; and Texas owns 28 percent of the natural gas reserves, California 1.6 percent. For 30 years, California has imposed energy efficiency regulations that have kept power consumption relatively low – compared to other U.S. states – even as the population soared and the economy boomed. California’s new mandate that 20 percent of electricity production come from renewable sources by 2010 and the recently enacted landmark global warming law will keep the state on the green path.

Read Full Post »