The best news of the year for the power-electronics community is the ongoing story about cooperation among IT people, PC makers, government, utilities, and power-supply and chip makers. I owe this insight to Carl Blake, Director of Technical Marketing for International Rectifier's Discrete Products division. Once he'd mentioned it, though, it struck me that it should have started to become apparent at the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) in March. It was certainly driven home at September's Digital Power Forum (DPF) and the Power Electronic Technology (PET) in October.
IT and Power Supplies
It was at APEC that I first saw Cisco, Dell, and HP approach the Power Sources Manufacturers Association (PSMA) to lay out the problems they were having with heat in the data center.
At DPF, there was a whole three-day track on data centers. Presenters in that track included server-makers, processor IDMs, power chip companies and power-supply manufacturers. One presentation in particular put things into perspective: a talk by Artesyn's Geof Potter, who noted that in the data centers, power consumption per server rack is heading toward 40 KVA. (Artesyn is now part of Emerson.) At the same time the cost of energy is on a rising curve, such that even today, the annual cost of operating each rack-mounted server exceeds the cost of the server itself, and in some new data centers, cost projections for annual energy usage exceed the cost of the actual building.
These developments have too big an impact to escape the attention of the companies that run data centers. What is happening, Potter says, is that "paying attention to energy use reduction within the server rack can have substantial payback," which is leading to equipment suppliers starting to offer value propositions that include energy savings.
(Not that everybody has gotten the word. In many companies, IT managers and facilities managers live in separate silos and some of those IT managers never get to see construction costs and utility bills. Yet there are encouraging signs.)
What can be done in the server environment? Potter noted seven ways to reduce energy consumption that are feasible today. Of those, the one I found most promising involves "virtualization." In this context, the term addresses the fact that contemporary operating systems tend to distribute processing load across all the servers available, even though a server running at 30% capacity draws as much power as one running at full capacity. Virtualization offers a way to shift processes dynamically so that servers can be shut down until needed.
Virtualization is particularly interesting from the power-supply standpoint, because it depends on digital power-supply monitoring and control, a technology that moved from "interesting" to "mainstream" in 2006. (See "A Short Guide To Making Money From Digital Power" ED Online 13657.)
Home and Business Power
Looking outside the data center, I'm going to take some information from a talk at PET to illustrate the cooperation between government and power utilities and the power electronics business. Note that this industry/government fellowship is something relatively new. As recently as 2003, when the California Energy Commission (CEC) announced its "1-Watt Standby" initiative, the industry greeted it with dismay. The Electronic Industries Association, the Consumer Electronics Association and the Telecommunications Industry Association flat out urged that the CEC "remove from consideration electronics, including battery chargers and external power supplies for minimum efficiency." Yet a year and a half later, the Power Sources Manufacturers Association (PSMA) signed on fully with the CEC efficiency efforts. That more or less convinced the rest of the industry that the CEC goals were at least attainable, and if they made power supplies cost a little more, well, "removal from consideration" was never really in the cards.
That talk at PET was presented by Chris Calwell, Ecos Consulting's Policy & Research Director. To put things in context, Calwell began by observing that however we see them as engineers, government agencies look on their programs as climate-change regulations, not energy efficiency regulations. No more is compliance a matter of retrofitting a few scrubbers or controls on smokestacks. It's now all about reducing electricity, natural gas, and gasoline consumed by all buildings, plug-in devices, and vehicles; minimizing methane releases from oil and gas wells, landfills, and sewage treatment plants; switching from fossil fuels to alternatives that minimize CO2 emissions; and capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions from coal and natural gas power plants.