But Apple has embarked on an ambitious, and far from easy, task of building a new data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, that will be powered by 100% green energy, and not by any of the aforementioned methods. Instead, Apple has laid out a blueprint that combines a number of initiatives, including on-site generation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy sourcing, to achieve its 100% green goal.

The plans are significant, because it effectively represents the first 100% green data centre in more or less real world, albeit perhaps financially distorted, conditions – since Apple has the money to build a facility from scratch and to acquire enough land to build its own solar farm.

In terms of onsite generation, Apple says it will be able to generate about 60% of the projected 20MW needed to power the data centre from its own solar farm.

“We’re currently building two solar array installations in and around Maiden. These sites use high-efficiency solar cells and an advanced solar tracking system,” the company said on a dedicated page on the project. “A 100-acre, 20-megawatt installation on the same site as our data center will produce 42 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy annually. A 100-acre site located a few miles away will produce another 42 million kWh. Together that’s 84 million kWh of clean, renewable energy supplied annually. When our bio-gas-powered 5-megawatt fuel cell installation comes online later this year, it will provide more than 40 million kWh of renewable energy annually. This means Apple will be producing enough onsite renewable energy — 124 million kWh — to power the equivalent of 10,874 homes.”

Obviously, not many companies out there can easily justify the purchase of 200 acres of land and the solar panels to fit them out, but what Apple’s project represents is a proof of concept that such an endeavour is possible.

Direct access green power

But Apple doesn’t stop there. To power the remaining 40% of the Maiden facility, Apple will seek renewable energy from third party supplier. But instead of simply going out and buying RECs, which does not necessarily mean the power it is buying is from green sources, simply that an equivalent amount of green power is being generated somewhere, Apple is very specific about how it is going about buying green power.

According to Apple, it will be “directly purchasing clean, renewable energy generated by local and regional sources.” This is a paramount phase because it means that Apple will be buying energy that is in fact generated by renewable sources such as wind, solar, and bio-gas. Also, the fact it specifies ‘local and regional sources,’ means that it is supporting local green power initiatives, and consuming what is generated. This also minimises any losses to the power during long distance transmission.

“Directly purchasing clean local energy gives us the flexibility to meet our needs over time, helps us to ensure that our sources are reputable and responsible, and encourages local investment in renewable projects such as wind, solar, and bio-gas power in locations best suited for these resources,” the company said. “Adding renewable energy sources like these displaces dirtier energy sources from the grid. We’re also partnering with NC GreenPower — an independent, nonprofit organization created by the North Carolina Utilities Commission — to increase local renewable energy production throughout North Carolina. Today Apple’s largest project with NC GreenPower is helping the local landfill in Catawba County (located just three miles from the Maiden data center) to generate electricity using their waste methane gas.”

Energy efficiency

In addition to relying entirely on renewable energy, Apple will also minimise the energy requirements of the Maiden facility through a number of energy efficient measures. These include the use of a chilled water storage system to improve chiller efficiency by transferring 10,400 kWh of electricity consumption from peak to off-peak hours each day, the use of ‘free’ outside air cooling through a waterside economiser, a precision cool air distribution system, and cold air containment pods, a higher voltage power distribution to lessen losses, efficient LED lighting with motion sensors, and real time power monitoring for maximum efficiency. Apple has even gone as far as to put in a white roof to maximum solar reflectivity.

What’s important to remember is that each of these things are necessary parts to achieving Apple’s goal and each will take a lot of work, in terms of man hours, investment, logistics, operational complexity, and no doubt many other elements. Those are the challenges. That’s what it will take to get to zero carbon emissions for the data centre industry.

For Apple’s part, the Maiden site is not its first 100% green site. According to the company, its operations centres in Austin, Texas, Sacramento, California, and Cork, Ireland, as well as its Munich, Germany facility are also zero emission sites.

Apple is also planning to green two more data centres, a new one in Prineville, Oregon, and an existing site in Newark, California. For these sites, Apple will rely primarily on local direct access renewable energy.

The $60 million investment by Fujitsu focused on security, connectivity and availability enhancements to provide its 2,000 Australian enterprise and government customers with increased access to secure hosting services, the company said. Fujitsu also weighs the environmental sustainability of its data centres and Noble Park is now operating as one of the most energy efficient facilities of its size in the country.

According to Fujitsu, its data centres have a target PUE of 1.7 and that the company reports all GHG emission by the Noble Park facility, as well as all others in its Australian data centre network, to the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System (NGERS).

Mike Foster, Chief Executive Officer of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand said, “In the last few years Fujitsu has made significant local investments in new technology areas including data centres, cloud services, application development and managed services. We will continue to invest in ensuring that our customers have access to the best possible infrastructure in the region. The Noble Park upgrade is consistent with this strategy. The facility makes a key contribution to Fujitsu’s global data centre capability, which includes over 100 data centres worldwide.”

Below is Fujitsu’s sustainability targets for 2012 and 2020 from a 2008 baseline, including electricity usage in its offices, data centres, travel, and use of renewable energy.

According to Pike, the widespread adoption of energy efficient data center technologies and best practices could significantly limit the growth of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from data centers over the next several years. If current trends continue, GHG emissions from data centers are expected to total 1326 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent; green data center best practices could reduce that total to 1156 tons, a difference of 13% compared to the business-as-usual trend, said Pike.

“The drive toward green data centers is a response to business requirements to reduce costs across the company as well as a response to environmental concerns,” says research director Eric Woods.  “Within the data center environment, that translates to a mandate to reduce energy consumption, which in turn is driving innovation.  Data center operators are exploring new ideas related to business models, facility construction, layout and design, air flow dynamics, new technology, and monitoring and management tools.”

The deployment of green practices will result in an annual market opportunity that exceeds US$45 billion worldwide by 2016, with the Asia Pacific region coming in with the highest revenue growth at a CAGR of just under 30% during between 2011 and 2016. Both Europe and North America are projected to grwo at a CAGR of almost 27% in the same period, the researchers said.

Francis Maude, UK Cabinet Office Minister, was quoted as saying on the BusinessGreen news site that G-Cloud will allow the public sector to reduce its procurement costs.

Maude told the report that later this month, the Cabinet Office will report on the progress of its Green ICT strategy, originally launched last year. As part of the report, the UK government is expected to reveal its progress consolidating its data centres, and auditing the ICT requirements and efficient of various departments.

According to the report, the government has already started to compile the energy and cost data from each department and is in the process of consolidate its facilities and rationalise its applications and services.

“These will be reported in the Green ICT strategy first annual report and assessment due to be published shortly,” Maude said. “The Cabinet Office has collected the baseline information from Departments around the cost and energy consumed by Government data centres and their servers and is actively working to consolidate and rationalise Government data centres which will save energy and costs.”

You can read up on the UK government’s Green ICT Strategy, first published March 2011, here.

The new sites will handle a host of applications and services, including Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support, as well as the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

According to Minister for Human Services, Senator Kim Car, the project will merge 500 servers into just eight, thus improving utilisation rates, and lowering power and space requirements.

That’s the case with Emerson Network Power, who has been recognised by Forrester as the ‘dominant’ supplier in data centre infrastructure management.

Forrester’s March 2012: “Market Overview: Data Center Infrastructure Management Solutions” report identifies Emerson Network Power as one of two companies that dominates the DCIM supplier landscape within the data center facility and infrastructure market as it exists today. The report highlights Emerson Network Power’s Trellis^TM platform, a real-time infrastructure optimization platform that enables the unified management of data center IT and facilities infrastructure.

The report also identifies Emerson Network Power as a traditional power and cooling system vendor that has tight integration with the infrastructure side of the data center and offers very high-capacity data collection capabilities. The report also points out that only a few vendors, including Emerson Network Power, offer any kind of network capacity planning capabilities beyond simple inventories of ports.

The Trellis portfolio include modules include: Change Planner; Energy Insight; Power System Manager; Inventory Manager; Site Manager; and Virtual Insight; and Cooling System Manager.

In one case study by Emerson Network Power, the National Bank of Abu Dhabi’s leveraged the company’s DCIM solutions to gain a centralised vision and remote management of data centre systems, increasing system availability by 20%, and reduced power consumption while improving cooling by 2 degrees during extreme conditions.

Singapore Serangoon Data Center is located in northeastern Singapore. The tier III+ data center offers co-location, cloud services, NTT Com’s global network services and other related services. Key features are specifically designed to cater to companies in the financial, information technology and manufacturing sectors. The data center is connected directly to the Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE), NTT Com’s new undersea cable offering high-speed, high-reliability network environment between Singapore and other Asian locations including Japan. The facility hosts 2,500 racks in a total server room area measuring 5,000 square meters. Investment in the facility is about 12.4 billion JPY (approximately SGD 190 million).

In that way, energy efficiency is probably not on the top of the list of deciding factors when the Singapore site was selected, but it doesn’t mean NTT Com shelved any concept of being environmentally responsible altogether.

In fact, the Singapore site is a stunning example how high performance doesn’t necessarily have to mean compromises in sustainability. True, that the site in the middle of a busy city isn’t ideal for many standard green practices, like customised free air cooling, or accessing renewable energy resources, or even custom construction that improve energy efficiency. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean you can’t still do all you can to ensure a high level of sustainability performance.

For the Serangoon Data Centre, NTT has obviously put in a lot of thought into the design. Green features include closing off a side of the building and painting it gray, as well as deploying so-called horizontal louvers on other facades, just to minimise solar (heat) gain. NTT has also put in a green roof for the main facility and over the parking lot with foliage, a rainwater tank to collect water for irrigating those plants, and a solar panel on the roof for supplemental power.

The award, in recognition of NTT Com’s green data centre initiaitves, is shared with Vigilent, who provided the intelligent energy management systems to reduce electricity consumption and carbon emissions, as well as to significantly cut energy costs, at NTT Com’s two largest North American data centres. The companies will be recognized in a joint award for Facility Product Deployment, which highlights facility infrastructure products that significantly improve data center energy and resource efficiency.

“Projects like this prove that the right technology can deliver both corporate sustainability and reduced energy costs,” said Andy Lawrence, program director of the Uptime Institute Symposium and research director of Eco-Efficient IT at the 451 Group.

Previously, NTT America/NTT Communications announced it is helping enterprises achieve their energy efficiency goals through the telecom industry’s first data center deployment of Bloom Energy Servers, which run on renewable biogas.

Using the Vigilent system to address its energy management, NTT Com expects to reduce its electricity consumption in North America by over 7.6 million kWh and carbon emissions by 8.8 million lbs. a year, saving the company a projected $630,000 annually in energy costs.

The four consortiums are led by: Equinix Singapore Pte Ltd (partnering with Synapsense LLC, and Custom Mechanical Systems LLC); Toshiba Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (partnering with Nanyang Technological University); ClearManage Pte Ltd (partnering with AsiaSoft Pte Ltd, NEC Singapore and Nanyang Polytechnic); and 1-Net Singapore Pte Ltd (partnering with Envrocon Pte Ltd).

The consortiums are expected demonstrate technologies and innovations that improve energy efficiency in the data centre sector for a year, then share their findings with the rest of the industry.

Equinix’s “SG1 Cooling Energy Efficiency Project” will implement a real-time monitoring and control system to monitor the temperature and air pressure of the data centre wirelessly and optimise cooling at the different areas in the data centre. The existing computer room air-con (CRAC) units of the data centre will also be retrofitted with high efficiency variable-frequency drive fans to enable holistic control.

Toshiba’s “Outside Air Cooling in Modular Data Centre” project will make use of outside air to cool the servers if it detects that the ambient air is cool enough to do so. The project will make use of high temperature servers housed in a modular data centre that is designed to isolate the hot and cold areas, thus enabling it to be more energy efficient.

ClearManage’s “Data-Centre-in-the-Cloud” project will redesign the servers (including server board, power supply and UPS) to be more energy efficient. The project will also make use of server room containment technologies coupled with energy monitoring tools to ensure efficient use of energy.

1-Net’s “Entomiz Ambient Cooling System” project is easily deployable and it is non-intrusive to the server hosting area of the data centre. The solution retrofits the existing air-cooled air-con and mechanical ventilation (ACVM) system with a fine misting spray to cool the ambient temperature. This will reduce the load of the ACVM system, and thus increase cooling efficiency.

At an industry sharing session, the four consortiums demonstrated the cost and energy savings that can be attained through innovative and pioneering Green ICT solutions, the IDA said. “These solutions are projected to save up to 35% of the existing energy usage in data centres.”

Read the original IDA presentation on the Green Data Centre Innovation Challenge CFC initiative.