There is very important work being done around the world in not just thinking renewable energy sources but also more and more acting towards using the right renewable energy sources. In many markets around subsidies have been used to “move” usage over to the renewable alternatives. Economics might in my opinion be a help factor but in the long run a working market business model needs to be the solution. This report about developments in global markets for renewable energy can be a starting point for where we are and what needs to be done moving forward.
Challenges in production of renewable energy has been and still is a challenge when we talk about hyper scale. Hydro power plants use their dams as a storage facility so this industry has a well working solution. The issue in this industry is more bringing the energy to the markets. Transporting energy from the production source to the consumption market has shown to have issues with loss off capacity when the distance becomes long.
Politicians around are more and more focusing on the importance of energy distribution and an example from the EU can be found in this article.
Solar and Wind are growing sources for renewable energy but have the same challenge as other sources when there is lack of the main resource to produce the energy, no sun and no wind! Compared to the Hydro driven production these two sources need to have a well working storage model in place to be more optimal than today.
If we belive in predictions like this article about Solar investments we need to speed up the search for good and efficient storage solutions.
I have been hearing from several people around that there seems to be hard to find companies that investigate and develop smart and efficient technologies that can be used to meet the increasing demand of “always on and affordable” green energy. I have over the past weeks been looking around and also asked many that are in the center of high tech development companies. Still nothing..
Earlier today I found and article about plans for energy storage in the UK talking about a end to end solution with a competitive business model that can work. This seems to me to be a good start but still, do it really scale to meet all current and future needs? I think there is more to this and I will continue the search for solutions and companies that can help to the next solution.
While we all look for methods to store hyper scale amount off renewable energy we should act on where we take our compute power from. Data centers use more and more energy and in many situations the compute power do not need to be close to the users. Start looking for locations where there is surplus of renewable energy not in competition with the featured picture. A marked that should be very high on the recommendation list would be the Nordic marked.
Super scale data center campus can be powered from the marked above and can be found by following this link.
regards
bj