Intel boosts Green Power stocks

CHIP-MAKER Intel has moved to boost its Green credentials by becoming the largest corporate buyer of Green power in the United States.

The US Environmental Protection Agency latest Green Power Partners Top 25 list puts Intel in the number one position.

Intel also announced yesterday that it would purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt-hours a year of renewable energy certificates as part of a broad plan to reduce its impact on the environment.

The company said it hoped the record-setting purchase would help stimulate the market for green power, which should lead to additional generating capacity and ultimately, lower costs.

Renewable energy certificates, or RECs, are the “currency” of the renewable energy market and are widely recognised as a having credible and tangible environmental benefits.

Intel's REC purchase includes a portfolio of wind, solar, small hydro-electric and biomass sources.

“We have a long history of commitment to the environment and energy efficiency is an important consideration in everything we do, from building transistors to designing microprocessors and running our factories,” said Intel president and chief executive Paul Otellini.

Mr Otellini, who is also a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, a global group of leaders working to achieve an effective global climate treaty at next year's UN Environmental Summit in Copenhagen, said the renewable purchase was just one part of a multi-faceted approach to protect the environment.

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Google enters clean energy business

Google has entered the race to develop the technology to develop cheapr sources of renewable energy, promising to spend hundreds of millions on research and development efforts.

The Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies

The company will spend “tens of millions” on R&D for the project in 2008. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.

“We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers,” said Google co-founder and president Larry Page. “We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal.”

“With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one Gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades,” Mr Page said.

One Gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.

“If we meet this goal and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well.”

Coal is the primary power source for many around the world, supplying 40 per cent of the world's electricity.

“Lots of groups are doing great work trying to produce inexpensive renewable energy. We want to add something that moves these efforts toward even cheaper technologies a bit more quickly. Usual investment criteria may not deliver the super low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Dr Larry Brilliant, the executive director of Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org.

“Google.org's hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal.”

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Rudd pushes Green export opportunities

GREEN and clean technologies present excellent export opportunities for Australian innovators, according to Kevin Rudd.

The Labor government would make supporting the development of clean technologies for export markets a priority, Mr Rudd told the National Press Club in Canberra.

As part of that plan, Labor will spend $15 million on a Energy Export Strategy, and $20 million setting up a Clean Energy Innovation Centre.

“Responding to climate change and global warming is not just an environmental imperative; it is an important economic opportunity,” Mr Rudd said.

“Both carbon trading and renewable energy technology provide opportunities for the export of goods and services,” he said.

Australia would become a clean energy hub for the Asia-Pacific, Mr Rudd said, making clean energy central to Australia’s economic and environmental future.

“Labor will harness clean energy research, innovation and enterprise, so that Australia can build a low carbon economy and export climate change solutions to the world,” he said.

The Clean Energy Export Strategy will provide critical capacity in Austrade to promote Australian clean energy exports of products, technologies and services. Austrade liaison officers will work with individual clean energy firms to match their strengths with opportunities in clean energy growth markets such as China, India, Japan and the United States.

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IBM spruiks mainframe as Green saviour

JUST when the final stake seemed to have been driven through the heart of the ageless IBM mainframe architecture, another reason emerges to keep the Big Iron plugged in: Mainframe are Green.

In what IBM is calling the most significant transformations of its worldwide data centres in a generation, the company says it will consolidate 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 Z Series mainframes running Linux.

The result, IBM says, will be an 80 per cent reduction in the amount of energy required to drive the processing power compared to its current set up. The company says it expects to generate significant savings through the consolidation to mainframes – in lower power costs, and cheaper software and support costs.

As an exercise in ‘eating its own dog food’, IBM wants to demonstrate to potential customers that mainframes are at least part of the answer for companies seeking to reduce power consumption to meet emissions commitments.

The initiative is part of Project Big Green, a broad commitment that IBM announced in May to sharply reduce data centre energy consumption for the company and its clients.

Data centres are voracious users of electricity. IBM has more than eight million square feet of data centre space worldwide – the equivalent of 139 football fields.

IBM says that mainframe systems will be the key to the IT industry successfully reducing its power consumption requirements.

“The mainframe is the single most powerful instrument to drive better economics and energy conservation at the data centre today," said IBM System z mainframe general manager James Stallings.

“By moving globally onto the mainframe platform, IBM is creating a technology platform that saves energy while positioning our IT assets for flexibility and growth,” Mr Stallings said.

IBM plans to recycle the 3,900 servers through IBM Global Asset Recovery Services.

The IBM mainframe's ability to run the Linux operating system is key to the consolidation project, providing an open foundation for a wide variety of applications.

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Green group attacks power consumption

A CONSORTIUM of some of the most powerful names in the tech industry has combined resources to improve the energy efficiency of power-hungry data centers.

The so-called Green Grid is a US-based non-profit that will specifically investigate ways to reduce data centre power consumption, and to improve the life-cycle management of IT products – specifically recycling and the handling of hazardous waste.

The founding board of Green Grid includes hardware and software companies heavily engaged in data centre work – including IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, APC, Rackable Systems, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

The consortium believes energy efficiency in data centres is the single most significant issue facing IT companies and their customers today.

Green Grid members say there has not only been exponential growth in power and cooling costs in the past several years, but that customer demand for concentrated computing was outpacing the availability of clean, reliable power in much of the world.

The Green Grid doesn’t endorse vendor-specific products, instead seeking to provide industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data centre energy efficiencies.

Network Appliance is the latest large corporate to join Green Grid.

“Our customers are seeing explosive data growth and they are broadening the focus of their long-term data center power reduction efforts to include storage and data management practices,” said NetApp Core Systems vice-president Chris Bennett.

“While we can't eliminate the unending thirst for data, NetApp is helping customers buy and use less storage to drive down their data center’s carbon footprint one byte at a time. Our membership in The Green Grid demonstrates our continued commitment to advancing greater energy efficiency in data centers.”

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