The site, which houses the IT infrastructure of almost 500 major international organisations, will now purchase 100% of its energy from UK renewable energy provider, SmartestEnergy.

According to Telehouse, SmartestEnergy buys energy from independent generators from around the country and supplies it to its customers.

The move, according to Tokuji Mitsui, managing director of Telehouse and KDDI Europe, is part of the firm’s strategy to go green.

“The biggest challenge we face at Telehouse is to improve our energy efficiency and reduce our carbon footprint, and in order to support this challenge Telehouse has worked closely with industry leading partners and regulators. We are committed to our environmental responsibilities and continue to work to align our business strategy with our green ethics wherever possible,” he said.

“The majority of electricity supplied to us is utilised by our clients, therefore it is integral that we take on initiatives such as the 100 per cent green energy supply, which in turn benefits our customer’s credentials by reducing their carbon footprint. We intend to roll out this green partnership initiative with SmartestEnergy to all our European sites in the near future.”

What is unclear however is whether the decision to go with renewable energy will cost Telehouse any more than its current cost base, or whether any extra cost will be passed on to its customers.

One of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of renewable energy is the cost, since it typically costs more than conventional grid power. This, according to most industry experts, make renewable energy for large facilities like data centres economical infeasible unless government subsidies are involved – see our story on NTT America’s deployment of renewable energy systems at its California data centre.

Obviously, the press release can be interpreted in another way. Telehouse can source all its energy from SmartestEnergy for its own systems, but leave the choice to its customers to select its own source of power. In face the release makes clear that Telehouse London are awarded the Carbon Trust Standard, which certifies that organisations have measured, managed and reduced its carbon emissions across its OWN operations. It says nothing of the energy source that is used to power the equipment of its customers.

On the other hand, by connected to SmartestEnergy, Telehouse now have the ability to offer its customers access to renewables as well, if it is not doing so already. In fact, many data centre operators and managed hosting providers offer some kind of service for its customers to go greener, including more efficient equipment, renewable energy power, and so on.

According to news report, the same rules will be expanded to 75% of rural towers and 33% of urban powers by 2020.

The move is targeted at reducing the country’s reliance on diesel generators, which currently power about 60% of all sites in the country. If enforced, the new regulations will be first in the world to require mobile operators to deploy renewable energy to power its networks.

Telecoms operators will get some support from the government in the form of the Universal Services Obligation fund. The regulations are not specific to onsite renewable energy systems however, and do not exclude renewable power sourced from India’s burgeoning renewable energy sector.

As part of its statement, the DoT estimates that renewable energy generation makes up about 11% of the country’s entire power base.

“We’ve reached a point in our engineering projects where we’re facing new challenges related to our solar receiver design,” Google wrote in its blog. “At this point, other institutions seem better positioned than Google to take this work to the next level.”

However, all is not loss. True to its originally philosophy of trying to stimulate the renewable energy market, Google will make all that it has learned through the Initiative, namely research into technologies for solar power towers – a system that focuses a field of mirrors on a solar receiver on top of tower, which then captures that heat and turns it into electricity, available to the rest of the industry.

Here’s a video of the Heliostat project

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Here’s what Google has learned and is sharing in its own words:

• Smarter controls: In the past, the focus has been on making strong heliostat structures. We learned that using lower cost materials and smarter software controls can generate better performance at a lower cost. This ends up lowering the overall cost of the concentrating solar power system.
• The Brayton engine: Concentrating solar power plants traditionally use significant quantities of water for cooling. This poses a challenge to scaling these technologies, especially in the desert. Our research shows that using a “Brayton engine” — a jet engine that uses solar energy to heat air and does not require spray cooling with water — significantly reduces water use and may reduce operating costs as well.
• A systems approach: We took a system level approach to designing concentrating solar systems. By focusing on the cost and quality of the system as a whole, we tried to make cutbacks on some components, while compensating elsewhere to maintain performance. We believe this approach could reduce the cost of electricity generated by concentrating solar systems, rather than attempting to optimize each individual component, which can drive up overall costs.

The solution, based on Flexenclosure’s E-Site, will allow Airtel to harness solar and wind energy at the sites to minimise diesel consumption – and yes, CO2 emissions.

According to Flexenclosure, Airtel has been testing its solution in Kenya for the last two years and has achieved demonstrable results, including a substantial reduction in diesel consumption compared to previously 100% diesel powered sites.

In addition to optimised solar and wind generation systems and a bank of batteries to storage energy, E-Site solution also includes sophisticated control system that ensures maximum power is captured from the renewable energy sources and that the use of the battery bank is highly efficient, the company said.

Under the agreement, Ericsson will be responsible for implementation and maintenance services for all the sites.

Services are available from the company’s 18-hectacre campus in Kelfavik, Iceland, a location with key operating advantages that providers well over 50% cost savings over traditional data centres in Europe or New York, the company said.

The company also announced its first customer, Datapipe and its principle supplier, Colt Data Centre Services, a producer of modular data centres.

Verne Global’s commercial launch marks the first realisation of what has become a key marketing pitch for the Icelandic government – green data centres.

According to Verne Global, its facility is 100% carbon neutral, drawing power from Iceland’s dual-sourced renewable energy power grid and utilising Iceland’s ambient temperatures to provide free cooling.

“The demand for high capacity, flexible and scalable data centre campuses has increased in parallel with the growing concern of rising cost and environmental impact of traditional data centres,” said Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global. “We have designed a flexible, dynamic solution that answers the need for both high capacity computing and cost management.”

Another benefit of being in Iceland is that Verne Global not only has access to power and space, but plenty of it. The company says that the new facility will basically be able to support “almost any data centre power requirement, from racks to megawatts.”

The abundance of power available on the Verne Global campus, combined with it being 100% renewable is unique to the colocation industry.

Verne Global says it has selected Colt’s modular data centre solution, which is customised to offer chillerless cooling. The design allows Verne Global to gain rapid entry into the colocation business.

“Power remains one of the primary concerns for corporate IT managers as they evaluate their data centre needs and options going forward in terms of availability, cost and environmental impact,” said Katie Broderick, Senior Research Analyst, Servers and Datacenters, IDC. “Renewable power will continue to play an important role and, as the market evolves, Verne Global’s ability to source an abundant supply, coupled with the added benefit of free cooling, will present a compelling availability, cost and environmental advantage in the marketplace for companies looking to expand their data centre operations.”

The facility will be fitted out with a solution from Colt Data Centre Services (unrelated to Colt Telecom), which makes modular data centre equipment. According to Colt, it is shipping 500 square metres of capacity to Verne Global.

Datapipe is first customer

Verne Global also announced that managed services and infrastructure provider, Datapipe, has signed on as one of its first customers.

Datapipe says that Iceland’s location between the two largest financial markets in the world, London and New York, allows it to offer strategic services, such as disaster recovery, business continuity and cloud computing solutions.

“Verne Global has engineered an environmentally sustainable data centre that will enable Datapipe to expand into a new market while continuing our environmental leadership,” said Robb Allen, CEO of Datapipe. “Power and cooling efficiencies combined with the strategic geographic location will provide our clients with an option for carbon neutral, enterprise ready IT services and a 100% green cloud.”

Basically, home owners will be able to put up a solar power system costing up to US$30,000, at little or no upfront cost. Google will retain ownership of the solar power system, and will charge the homeowner a monthly fee, which the project say will be less or equalled to what they are paying today to their utility.

The business model is not only based on the monthly return, but also includes state and federal government subsidies for renewable energy production.

The project probably makes a lot of sense for high-priced energy regions, such as California, but the economics will be challenge for regions with lower energy costs, and less government subsidies.

According to the report, NBN Co., the company rolling out the NBN, is working closely with its supplier of wireless technologies, Ericsson, on energy efficient sites, including a trial of solar power for at least one site. NBN will also deploy “cluster base stations” to further drive efficiency.

While Ericsson did not clarify what “cluster base stations” are, it sounds very similar to the baseband hotel concept described by Nokia Siemens Networks’s Asia Head of technology, Mike Murphy. The idea is to have all the processing of a mobile network centralised in cluster locations in order to maximise scale and efficiency. The concept also reduces trips sites since any upgrade and maintenance can be taken care of with a few trips, instead of thousands of trips in previous network sites.

“We are deploying in a group, in one particular area, between 20 and 60 base stations at the one time to leverage off efficiencies of workforce and minimising the deployment of vehicles, crane, etc, so there’ll be huge reductions in travel and deployment of equipment,” NBN Co wireless project director Joe Prelc told CommsDay.

In his keynote, Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini said that the company’s “Haswell” products, scheduled for 2013 release, will enable Ultrabooks, not only to have an extended battery life, but also stay connected to online services such as email, social media and other digital content.

The company says that the new class of platform power management will feature advances in silicon technology and platform engineering that are expected to reduce idle platform power by more than 20 times over current designs.

Looking further into the future, Otellini predicted that platform power innovation will reach levels that are difficult to imagine today. According to the company, Intel’s researchers have created a chip that could allow a computer to power up on a solar cell the size of a postage stamp. Referred to as a “Near Threshold Voltage Core,” this Intel architecture research chip pushes the limits of transistor technology to tune power use to extremely low levels.

The keyboard will also operate for up to 3 months on a full charge without any light, the company says.

In addition to getting rid of the need for a battery, the K750 keyboard has also been redesigned to match Apple’s aluminum finish and white keys.

The unit is only a third of an inch thick and uses wireless networking at the 2.4GHz band. Logitech will also throw in its Unifying receiver, which you plug into your company and connects up to six Logitech peripherals.

Mitsubishi iMiEV electric vehicle

The project, dubbed “V2X,” will be rolled out in a trial deployment at the parking facility of Mitsubishi Motors’ Nagoya plant by March 2012, and will use the batteries of electric vehicles as storage for energy generated by a set of solar panels on the roof, according to this report by Utility Products citing Electric Daily News.

The system is designed to take the energy generated by the solar panel and then store them in the batteries of the vehicles. While I’m not absolutely sure on the technical details, but the system seems to work by ensuring that none of the power generated by the solar panels are wasted by storing it inside the vehicles. The installation includes built in units that draw power from the vehicles as the grid requires power, including converting it to alternating current for general use.

I’m assuming that the system will have control mechanisms in place so it doesn’t drain the vehicles completely – so employees can get home, and that the vehicles will come into the facility with sufficient [empty] storage capacity to make a difference.

Still, it is an interesting concept. After all, electric vehicles do have the potential to transport energy from one place to another. For example, all parking lots can have solar powered roofs, which will charge the vehicles during the day. Once fully charged, the vehicles can then be configured to pipe some of that power the home in the evening when the use gets home. That would enable every home with an electric vehicle to benefit from renewable energy to some extent – now that would be pretty cool.