Solar panels and an ice cooling system could reduce the energy costs of a new facility from US operator, i/o Data Centers.

According to this report in Data Center Knowledge, the i/o’s new 538,000 sq. ft. Phoenix ONE facility will feature a 4.5-megawatt solar power system to supplement its overall energy draw from the grid – expected to be around 80 megawatts at peak. The solar power system will be installed in phases with the first patch of 5,000 panels offering 500 kilowatts of power is expected to be up and running by the beginning of next year.

Interestingly, the installation of the solar power system doesn’t provide free energy, as in the case of alternative energy powered wireless networking equipment. Large installations such as the one on Phoenix ONE’s 11 acre roof, is typically too capital intensive for facilities operators. Instead, they are built by the systems suppliers themselves (usually with some form of government subsidy), sold off to a holding company, who then sell power (under a long term contract at a fix price) to the facility owner. In this case, the article notes that the power from the solar system is actually more expensive at 18 cents per kWh, than the 7 cents per kWh that the utility charges.

What it does give i/o is price certainty going into the future from the solar system, as well as the ability for the facility to reduce its reliance on grid power during the day, when the price of electricity the highest.

At the same time, the Phoenix ONE facility will also incorporate a “time-shifted cooling” system. While it doesn’t specified the vendor for the system, it sounds very similar to the system introduced by Ice Energy, which produces cooling capacity in the evening – when electricity is cheaper – and stores that capacity in the form of ice for use during the day.

“If we can generate 3 megawatts during the day, combined with our thermal storage, we can shave our power costs by about 50 percent,”George Slessman, the CEO of i/o Data Centers, said in the report. “Anything I can do to move my power consumption to off-peak hours is going to save a lot of money. Solar is the renewable approach that works best during peak daytime power pricing.”

Additional energy efficiency measures adopted by the Phoenix ONE facility include SGI’s ICE Cube modular data center container, which provides high-density server and storage capacity in 20′ and 40′ ISO shipping containers, and has capacity for up to 2,800 independent servers, 22,400 cores or 11 Petabytes of storage. Documentation from SGI says its ICE Cube containers can reduce power and cooling requirements for data center infrastructure by as much as 80% compared to traditional ‘brick and mortar’ data center designs.