Data centers account for about 2 percent of U.S. electricity use. The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that the number is up from 0.8 percent in 2000. To cut their operational costs, companies are trying to design their facilities with energy efficiency in mind.
In Seattle's Sodo District, Microsoft is trying to reinvent how its data center uses energy.
Twenty racks of servers are put below a set of steel frames which place electrical cabinets the size of a mini-fridge. Inside, is a natural-gas-powered fuel cell.
That technology, according to Microsoft engineer Sean James, could allow future data centers to someday unplug from the power grid entirely.
By generating electricity literally on top of the computing hardware, Microsoft's design eliminates the inefficiency of producing electricity at a distant power plant and transporting it long distances to data centers.
Beside reducing electricity consumption, the technology could also reduce energy footprint of the fast-growing data-center business, eliminating a portion of the carbon emissions that fuel global warming.
Big data centers typically have their own substation-sized link to the power grid.
With demand for internet services escalates, web giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and others are scrambling to build warehouse-size data centers across the globe. The business is a massive, and growing, consumer of energy.
Other ways companies have implemented to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels include, and not limited to: buying renewable energy or building their own wind or solar farms.
Microsoft's design is still in trial at this date. But Microsoft's estimates that if the cost of fuel cells comes down, the company's fleet of facilities could save a total hundreds of millions of dollars.
Servers in data centers are powered by a maze of electrical equipment, and they.create a lot of heat. This requires them to use industrial-scale air circulation and cooling systems to keep things from overheating.
Since a sudden loss of power could cripple the facility and erase data, data centers have backup batteries plugged into the grid. As a last line of defense, they also have diesel generators the size of shipping containers.
Microsoft's fuel-cell concept would eliminate most of that equipment.