Texas Data Centers to be powered by wind

[Following the examples of MIT, Ecotricity in the UK and CANARIE’s Green IT program many companies, schools and universities are starting to deploy zero carbon data centers using renewable power such as wind , sun and hydro. These deployments will become critical in the next 5 years as global temperatures start to ratchet up with the return of solar sun spots, El Niño and continued growth in anthropogenic emissions. Many people think that Climate Change is something that will happen in the later half of this century. But in fact, in a recent paper by NASA and US Naval Research Labortory, researchers predict that in the “next” 5 years global surface temperature will increase 0.15 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC. Major forest fires in the Western US are predicted as a result. Thanks to Nicole VanHove for this pointer –BSA]

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/20/wind-powered-data-center-planned/

A Texas startup plans to build a data center powered by energy from huge “wind farms” in the Texas panhandle and the Gulf of Mexico. Baryonyx Corp.has been awarded three wind energy leases for 8,000 acres onshore in Dallam County, Texas and another 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said. Baryonyx has also acquired 8 acres of land in Stratford, Texas for its data center project.
Baryonyx was formed in May to build data center projects powered by renewable energy resources. Its primary focus will be wind energy, but the company is also developing plans to eventually use hydrogen fuel cells and solar power to support its facilities when wind generation ebbs due to weather conditions.
The project is the most ambitious effort yet to harness wind power to provide electricity for data centers. Green House Data has built a 10,000 square foot facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming that runs primarily on wind energy, while Microsoft has demonstrated wind-powered containers packed with servers.
100 Turbines for Data Center
Baryonyx plans to build a 28,000 square foot data center in Stratford, which will be powered by 100 wind turbines built on the adjacent land that will generate up to 150 megawatts of power. Each of the turbines will be able to generate up to 3.3 megawatts of power. Capacity not needed by the data center will be sold to local utilities. Baryonyx said it will take about 3 years to reach the operational phase for the wind-powered data center.
Leases Support Texas Schools
Once the wind farms are built and producing energy, they will pay royalties to the state’s Permanent School Fund that in the form of power
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From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ±0.03 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC.

So conclude Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in a new Geophysical Research Letters study, “How Will Earth’s Surface Temperature Change in Future Decades?”

http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2009GL038932-pip.pdf

Also a major new study, “Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” finds a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:

We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.

http://ulmo.ucmerced.edu/pdffiles/08JGR_Spracklenetal_submitted.pdf