A detail area from the infographic for this issue's Innovate column.

For the current ‘Innovate’ column in Sierra magazine, I took a look at what’s being done to green the data center. The task was challenging not just because data centers themselves are complex, or because energy efficiency is hard to explain, but because creating an infographic that shows how these two interact was enough to make my brain bleed. I hope the graphic (done with graphic designer Brian Kaas) is understandable, and I welcome your comments on how it turned out.

Data centers have long been energy hogs, mainly because it takes so much air conditioning to keep thousands of servers from overheating. Meanwhile, these computing powerhouses continue to multiply and grow as more and more computing work occurs in ‘the cloud.” Now data centers are caught in two competing crosscurrents of the early 21st Century: the need for ever-greater computing power and the need to reduce our carbon footprint and energy use. How do we meet the burgeoning demand for data centers and have them collectively make less impact?

While researching this story I learned about the metric of  Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) that has become the industry standard in the last few years. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and now that power usage can be measured, data centers are becoming dramatically more efficient. But PUE doesn’t tell the whole story.  Organizations like The Green Grid are pressing forward on creating other metrics to reduce the footprint of data centers, such as Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).

Other efforts are afoot to make data centers work in tandem with sources of renewable energy, like solar and wind farms. A few months ago I wrote about one such research push being made by HP, AMD, and NYSERDA. But the field is young, and it will probably be years before anyone can boast that they are Googling entirely on power drawn from the sun.

Christian Belady

The profile subject for this month’s column is Christian Belady, the general manager for data center research at Microsoft. Belady is credited by many as the creator of the PUE metric and is a leader in prodding his employer toward greater computing efficiency. As a lover of camping, I was amused to hear Belady’s story about how he help start the drive toward energy-sipping data centers by shoving some servers into a tent during the Seattle winter, to show that they could operate just fine without all that wasteful air conditioning. Now that’s my kind of tough love.

New Column: The Lean, Green Data Center is a post from: The Ferris Files

I was obliged to draw a picture of geothermal energy for my latest Innovate column for Sierra magazine. That’s harder than it sounds. I’m a writer, not a graphic designer, and I’m more comfortable with a reporter’s notebook than a sketchbook. But in order to fulfill the column’s mission of revealing the world’s coolest and cutting-edge energy technology, I had to dig down and find my inner sketchist.

I thought it would be interesting to show you how my original, hamfisted drawing turned into the sleek, glossy infographic you see in the magazine. Here, side by side, are my original sketch and the final, professional infographic that appeared in the July/August 2011 Innovate, Geothermal in Coal Country. (Click on the images to expand.)

My original drawing.

Final graphic by artist Brian Kaas.

The idea for this column started with one factoid: A study had determined that the most promising spot on the East Coast for clean, emissions-free geothermal energy was in West Virginia. West Virginia? Like, coal-belching, mountaintop-removing West Virginia? I made a few calls and got ahold of Brian Anderson, an assistant professor at West Virginia University. Over the course of several conversations, he laid out for me his complex yet ingenious scheme for harnessing Appalachia’s subterranean heat.

You can see the details in the column, but I’ll add that I was impressed by the scope of Anderson’s plan. He has done nothing less than re-imagine West Virginia’s energy system, using geothermal heat as the key to an interlocking set of energy loops that turns the clippings from the timber industry (the state’s third largest) into biofuel, and uses the greenhouse gas emissions from the local Mount Storm coal plant to drive heat from the ground. He’ll need buy-in from big industry if he hopes to build such a mammoth and expensive project.

My challenge was to present this graphically — a far lesser challenge than Anderson’s, but difficult nonetheless. (Neither Anderson nor anyone else had ever created a drawing.) How could I depict three distinct yet interconnected energy loops operating above ground, while showing another loop circulating 2.4 miles underground? With explanatory callouts? And do this in a graphic that’s less than eight inches wide?

After tapping my pencil awhile on a blank page, it occurred to me that I could show the underground portion with a diagonal cutaway that would take up only a small part of the graphic area. Above ground, I decided to take the three above-ground systems — homes, forests, coal plant — and give them each a chunk of real estate on the page.

Here’s what I came up with (the attractive final product was created by graphic artist Brian Kaas). What do you think? What could this ink-stained scribbler have done better? Many more Innovates lay ahead, after all, and I welcome the feedback.

Visualizing the Future of Geothermal Energy is a post from: The Ferris Files

Tidal currents in Cobscook Bay on the Gulf of Maine. Courtesy University of Maine

My latest “Innovate” column explores the mysteries of gathering electricity from the tides. Tides are in a category by themselves as a source of energy; they exert themselves in every ocean, but only in a few locales do they get moving fast enough to spin a turbine. In the U.S. some of those places are the East River in New York, Puget Sound in Washington State, the Gulf of Alaska, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Gulf of Maine. The pulses of the Gulf’s Cobscook Bay are shown at the left in all their beguiling glory.

Cobscook Bay. Image credit: The Nature Conservancy

I got turned on to the Gulf of Maine when I found my interview subject, Dr. Huijie Xue of the University of Maine (and creator of this graphic). A specialist in modeling of tidal currents, Xue is monitoring the very first turbines to be placed in the Gulf by the Ocean Renewable Power Company. Specifically, she’s trying to figure out if a bank of turbines on the bay floor will harm the bay’s extraordinary ocean life.

It is a breathtakingly difficult question to answer, mostly because no one has ever tried to study tides to this level of granularity. In the 20th Century only commercial reasons to measure tides were shipping and boating. Tell a fisherman when to expect the surface tide will turn and how fast, and that’s all science needed to answer. Now Xue is among a new generation of oceanographers attempting to decipher the tidal action from bay floor to the surface at locations like Cobscook Bay, with its torturously complicated shape. Then she needs to determine what effect a turbine might have on, say, the transportation of lobster larvae. Not so easy.

In the column I also look at cool designs for tidal turbines, which I will explore more deeply in my next post.

Read the New Column, “Power from Tides” is a post from: The Ferris Files

I explored alternative designs in wind power for my latest “Innovate” column in Sierra magazine, and can report that 31 flavors of turbines are poised to engulf the plain ol’ vanilla version we know so well. It isn’t that anything’s so wrong with Old Reliable; it’s more that there’s categories of wind that a giant whirligig just can’t use.

Vertical-axis turbine. Image Credit: jetsongreen.typepad.com

On the roof of Adobe Systems in San Jose there’s a gang of vertical-axis turbines, spinning in breaths of wind that would leave your traditional turbine inert. Go even smaller and you find the Windbelt, suitable for installation by the hundreds on bridges or porch railings.

Sky Windpower turbine. Image Credit: skywindpower.com

Then there’s Earth’s atmosphere, where winds blow with even more power than they do on the Dakota prairies. A propeller on a steel post could only dream of catching the breezes harnessed by an out-there generation of kites. Tethered to the ground with a power line, these models describe endless circles in the sky 1,200 feet up, outfitted with two small propellers like a cross between a barnstormer and a Predator drone. Or the Sky Windpower turbine, which is essentially a helicopter the size of an airliner held to the ground by the world’s longest extension cord. It would fly itself five miles up into the Jet Stream, and if it needed maintenance or if the weather got too rough, it would maneuver itself back to the ground.

FloDesign generator. Image Credit: Sierra magazine

Back on Earth, the contraption that might kill the garden-variety windcatcher is the FloDesign turbine, currently undergoing testing in Massachusetts. Designed by aerospace engineers, it might do to the standard Vestas or General Electric turbine what the jet engine did to the prop plane. FloDesign is optimized to suck in air so its rotor spins like a crazed dervish. Its compact design means turbines might be able to be placed closer together than today’s spidery creatures, and quite possibly generate more power. Less space, more power; hasta la vista, vanilla turbine.

Aerogenerator turbine. Image Credit: Sierra magazine

Finally, I am waiting for the ambitious mayor of some oceanside city to unveil plans for an Aerogenerator. Standing 450 feet off the water, this behemoth would produce enough power for 2,700 homes, but even more importantly it would become an icon admired for its sheer industrial size, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. Unlike other monumental architecture, though, it would move, making three ponderous rotations a minute for the tourists’ cameras.

Maybe the plain ol’ wind turbine won’t disappear. Maybe it just will lose its category-defining status, the way that the term “computer” has come to mean more than just a big beige box sitting on your desk. The wind industry will have its laptops, Google Androids and iPads, each with its own size blades — or perhaps no blades at all.

All this reflection on the wind turbine has me wondering when we will become familiar enough with turbines that we begin to experiment with something other than their shape and style. Henry Ford famously said that “People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.” How long until the wind industry breaks out of its own beige box and turn out a windcatcher in dashing red, or shimmering gold?

What Wind Turbine 2.0 Will Look Like is a post from: The Ferris Files

Thermoacoustic Engine. The thermoacoustic engine is a technology that has some serious explaining to do. Many sources of natural energy, such as wind or solar or wave power, are fairly easy to get your mind around. But what the heck makes a thermoacoustic engine run?  The short answer is waste heat, which our industrialized society (and even rural society) has plenty of.

Efficient Cookstoves: Waste heat in a poor, off-grid community comes from the cookstove that combusts wood, dung, or some other burnable to cook food for the family. There are millions such cookstoves in the world and most are ripe for serious design improvements. A few simple changes to a stove’s design can slash the amount of feed wood, keep children safer, eliminate soot in the hut (and wipe black carbon from the skies), and cook food faster.

Solar Refrigerator: Another head-scratcher. How is it possible that a refrigerator could get cold because it is out in the blazing sun? Students at Michigan State University figured out how, and are doing so with materials readily available in Guatemala.

Windbelt: The windbelt fills a void our wind portfolio: It produces small doses of power very close to where it’s needed and can operate in winds that are strong or weak. It does this without lopping off the heads for birds, and requires almost no maintenance.

Treadle Pump: When I saw my first video of the treadle pump, my first reaction was, “Of course!” A farmer who can’t afford diesel and isn’t on the electric grid could save hours every day with the help of this cardio machine made from steel or wood.  An hour or more on the treadle pump can replace hours of labor for farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and at a price they can actually handle.

New Ideas in Rural-Size Energy is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo by Nick Hobgood

If there’s one thing I learned from reporting this month’s Innovate column, it’s this: The biggest beneficiaries of renewable energy will be the poor, rural farmers of the Third World.  The billions of people who live off the grid in Africa, Asia and Latin America will use smaller and humbler technology than we will in the urban, modernized world. Yet its impact will be far greater.

In Europe, the U.S. and parts of Asia, the focus is on building massive solar installations and windfarms that are powerful enough to replace the carbon-spewing sources we already have, like coal-fired power plants, and that can feeds into the robust electricity grid we already own. Our power sources will change, but for the most part we’ll use those electrons for the same activities we do now. The developing world doesn’t resemble this equation at all. Entire regions have no money for projects this big, and no grid to speak of.

Traveling in rural Africa and Mexico, I’ve seen that the defining characteristic of the small backwater village is its lack of electricity. During the day a tinny radio powered by batteries plays at the grocery kiosk. At night the town shuts down, except in the orbit of the few businesses fortunate enough to have a kerosene lantern. A person is living a lifestyle of the rich and famous if he has a TV running off an old car battery. Though cellphones have become common, they’re difficult to charge and can’t provide nearly the connection to the world that an Internet-enabled laptop can.

For this month’s column, I looked at small yet cutting-edge technologies that could change this scenario. Some are novel ways of producing a few modest watts, enough to load a battery that can light a bulb in the hut at night so Mom or Dad can prepare for tomorrow’s harvest, and the kids can study.  Just these few hours of productive time could spark dramatic changes in health, prosperity and educational attainment. As we learn to make power generators that are small, powerful and cheap, it will be possible for even poor villagers to have access to computers and the Internet. And with that, the village might achieve just enough prosperity and convenience that its residents don’t have to flee to the urban slums to make a living.

In my next post, I’ll explore what these technologies might look like.

This Issue’s “Innovate” Column: Energy for the Developing World is a post from: The Ferris Files

I’m excited about this assignment because it lets me roam about at the beginning of our new era, the Renewables Age, and bend down to pick up the shiniest objects. The field is suffused with a sense of possibility. Seems like every week I hear about a new idea for capturing electricity from an orphan source, or harnessing it in a  superior way. Trapping windpower (PDF) from passing subway trains! Making ice at night to cool buildings by day! Deriving fuel from our own sludge, or from carbon dioxide in the air, or from a glass of water!

Innovate is eye candy for techno-enviro geeks. The centerpiece is a large graphic about a technology, or a suite of technologies, that could solve one of our myriad energy conundrums. The trick for me as a journalist is to find the inventions and trends, and then work with a graphic artist to turn complex ideas into an illustration that can be understood at a glance. Finally, I do a profile of one of the pioneers of that exciting new field.

Someday a decade or more from now, when the Renewable Age is fully upon us, we will do what humans do: We will glance back at promising technologies that sputtered out and chuckle in a knowing way; we will admire the victorious inventors, who will live in mansions and run businesses that have become boring and predictable; we will drive cars with a battery the size of a tea bag and a tank filled with gas made from old coffee grounds, but we will complain that it doesn’t have enough cupholders.

This is not the column for that day. This is the column for this day, when we don’t yet know who the winners or losers are, but can see with growing certainty that something fantastic is just around the corner.

My New Column Starts This Month In Sierra Magazine is a post from: The Ferris Files