How serious is eBay about using renewables to make their data centers more eco-friendly?

According to an April 10 story in the eBay News Room, there’s “a lot of green goodness” going on lately, including the company’s largest solar installation to date. It’s a 665 kilowatt (kW) solar power system featuring 72,000 square feet of solar panels, covering virtually every foot of roof space on top of the Topaz data center located in South Jordan, Utah. Given the Utah sun, this is prime real estate for a solar installation.

• The Topaz rooftop features 2,375 solar panels
• The installation will produce 924,013 kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean electricity annually – this is equivalent to offsetting 702 tons of greenhouse gas emissions or planting 136 acres of trees
• The Topaz solar array, combined with renewable installations in California and Colorado, brings eBay’s total renewable energy capacity to almost 2 megawatts – about 11 percent of eBay’s total U.S. data center electricity demand
• The investment is projected to pay for itself within four years, says eBay, thanks to lower electricity bills, tax incentives, and Federal stimulus dollars

eBay recognizes there’s always more to do. Example? The renewable energy project at Topaz will generate less than 10% of the total load of that data center. Recognizing the limitations this represents, eBay says it is committed to continue to do “what we can, where we can, to source greener, cleaner energy.”

“Along the way,” the company says, “we hope our efforts—the successes and the challenges—will help other companies and organizations see their role in achieving a sustainable, clean energy future in a new and, hopefully, optimistic light.”

As the march towards a greener data center industry continues, some very cool things are happening in some very hot places.

So where are tomorrow’s green data centers going to be built?

All over the world, with some locations being more attractive than others.

One country seems to be working extra hard to make itself appealing as a site for hosting the world’s information – Iceland.  In a recent Bloomberg article reported in The Economic Times, Iceland proudly pointed to its cool temperatures, geothermal energy, and location between North America and Europe as selling points for why it will become an increasingly popular destination for green IT.

Jeff Monroe is CEO of Verne Global, a venture launched by Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson (a former banker and Iceland’s first billionaire) to capture a piece of the green data center market. “Iceland happens to be a rare spot on the earth where there is a convergence of attributes that tick all the boxes,” says Mr. Monroe. “You have 100% renewable energy. We can do 100% free cooling.”

Verne Global has already built a $700 million data center in Iceland in a former NATO air force base. “The project relies on renewable energy from hydroelectric and geothermal power plants,” reports The Economic Times. “The site is equipped with heat wheels that funnel hot air out and cool air in, a lower-cost alternative to standard air conditioning.”

Verne Global, like many other businesses, sees a huge upside in this kind of data center. How big will green get?  Investment in energy-efficient server farms will skyrocket to $41 billion by 2015, according to Pike Research.

To tap that kind of market potential, Iceland, according to The Economic Times, is “seeking to reinvent itself as a secure data haven halfway between Europe and North America as it recovers from a near total economic collapse and the 2008 failure of its top lenders. That nascent effort will get a boost from a link to Emerald, a $300 million undersea cable stretching from the west coast of Ireland to New York slated to be completed next spring. To spur tech investment, Iceland has also reduced duties on imports of equipment.”

Looks like things are heating up in some very cool places.

Who says you have to burn excessive energy to cool servers?

As reported by wired.com, Facebook is exploring a technology that controls temperatures in the data center by shifting software workloads among the servers, automatically, according to the air pressure recorded on either side of each machine.

Says wired.com, “The technology is laid out in a Facebook patent application recently released to the world at large … the patent application describes a system that uses a load balancer to shift tasks among servers based on their particular cooling needs, which are related to air pressure in the data center.”

“Determining the cooling needs beforehand avoids spikes in server temperature, thereby enabling the servers to operate safely at a temperature closer to their maximum rated temperatures,” the application reads.

The goal is to run each server as hot as possible without malfunctioning. The higher the temperature, the more the data center owner/operator saves on cooling costs.

This is cool stuff (literally).

Facebook’s system is designed for data centers with hot/cool aisles. The system monitors the pressure difference between the two aisles and assigns each server’s workload accordingly. Explains wired.com, “At a given pressure difference, a server can only handle a certain workload without exceeding a particular temperature threshold, and Facebook’s system attempts to keep the servers as close to this threshold as possible.”

Is Facebook using this system today? Unclear.

But the industry’s march towards energy efficiency and reduced carbon footprint is crystal clear. And Facebook, among others, seems to be leading the way.