Internet juggernaut Google is moving into the renewables industry in a BIG way. Not only has the giant business been funding green energy start-ups like Aptera and Actacel, it has now filed a patent on a wave-powered data centre that would use seawater for cooling.
The patent uses technology that already exists, like the Pelamis, a semi-submersible floating device that creates enough energy from waves to power around 500 households. The idea would be to put the Pelamis systems out at sea to obtain maximum wave energy.
Pirates or Carbon Emissions – which is the biggest threat?
The idea is a sensible one (and Google is not the only one pursuing it) because data storage has already become quite a contentious issue: the planet’s 44 million servers actually use 0.5% percent of the world’s electricity. If you total up data centre emissions, one guesstimate is that they are close to the same level as carbon output of nations such Argentina or the Netherlands.*
However, there are concerns about the siting of off-shore data centres because they are eminently hi-jackable in the physical rather than virtual sense, and the increase of piracy around many international waters makes them vulnerable to being overrun by pirates who then either demand a ransom to leave or mine the data and use it to extract funds from those unsuspecting customers who have data stored there.
*Statistics courtesy of Computer Weekly
Green Google image courtesy of Juancho507 at Flickr under a creative commons licence
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