Will Computers Kill the Benefits of Going Solar?

Nearly everyone in the U.S. it seems wants to see more solar power facilities put into the ground, but getting to the point where solar actually makes a dent in the consumption of traditional electricity is getting tougher and tougher.

Take this factoid from Spansion CEO Bertrand Cambou. According to Cambou, the data centers in the U.S. consume twice as much power as the collective solar footprint produces in the country. The overall solar footprint is expanding daily of course, but so is the number of computers. In Northern California, data centers gobble of 2.5 percent of the electricity and the figure is growing, Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager at PG&E, told me. If you think about it, growth in computing is more inevitable and predictable: demand doesn’t depend on tax credits.

Thus, we appear to be in a situation where solar can limit the growth of greenhouse gases, but not reverse it. Unless, of course, U.S. consumers and utilities begin to concentrate more on that all-important but dull topic: energy efficiency. Buy products that do more on less power. Utility executives and national laboratory scientists talk about how efficiency needs to be the primary goal in the U.S. but it is taking time to sink in. It’s just not as cool as a biodiesel car.

Energy efficiency, though, is a message you will hear a lot in the next decade from chip companies like Spansion. Spansion wants to replace DRAM, the memory inside most servers, with a type of flash called EcoRAM the company will come out with in the fourth quarter. In a hypothetical, Spansion says that a data center based around the company’s flash costs 1/4th as much to operate, takes up 1/4th of the floor space and costs less than half of a traditional one because the chips use far less power and there is less need for air conditioning. (You can save even more by putting in flash-based hard drives, which Intel starts to sell in the fourth quarter. Most flash execs are skeptical about EcoRAM and selling flash drives instead, but, hey, if Spansion can pull it off, all power to them.)

And if you put it in today’s servers? The data centers in the U.S. would only consume half of the energy coming from the country’s solar panels, he said.