Welcome to Renewable Energy Info

Renewable energy sources have diverse origins, a feature that demands equally diverse technologies to capture them. My interest in these (new) technologies resulted in this blog. If will focus on well developed technologies that are already put into practice, and on promising technologies that are still under development.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Google gives the good example

Sources: Geek.com, EI Solutions, Google

Everybody knows Google. They are maybe the most powerful company on the planet. They hold the key to the internet kingdom. For this, they have huge data centers to store information on which websites contain which information. And using these huge data centers costs a LOT of energy. However, Google has always been an example of a company that thinks ahead, and they are committed to helping build a clean energy future.

They support breakthrough clean technologies and implement them in their own company. For example, in May 2007, Google went solar, as they completed the installation of the largest solar power system ever installed on a single corporate campus, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California (have a look at this video). If interested, one can even see



Recently, Google filed a patent entitled “Water-Based Data Center”. It reveals their plans to create a sea-based and sea-powered data center. The power would be generated from Pelamis machines, that harness energy from waves (as discussed earlier on this blog). These Pelamis machines are already tested and used in wave farms or aboard ships to generate power while they are anchored. Google’s patent suggests a number of Pelamis machines combined with a server farm to create a floating, self-sufficient data center. The energy generated would not only power the servers, but also the pumps to cool the farms.



The benefits of such a system include the fact they are easily scalable by just adding new Pelamis machines and farms, they can be deployed quickly to different locations and are a clear use of renewable energy while catering for future data center capacity needs.

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