Yahoo redesigns data center, ditches carbon offsets

Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.

Yahoo's David Dibble discusses the company's plans for a Buffalo-area data center with New York Senator Charles Schumer (right, red tie) and other state officials.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.

Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day. Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency.

As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.

Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.

Corrected at 3:05 p.m.: Yahoo clarified the new data center will be in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo.

[MarauderX]

It is great to see companies moving toward better effiency. I wonder if the design they are looking to patent has been used elsewhere for data centers. Is the data center cooled with 100% outside air 24/7/365?

[kirkjmiller]

The Yahoo Data Center will actually be located in Lockport, NY (about 15 miles north of Buffalo). As for the cooling method, Matrix Telecommunications has used this Data Center design since 2004. This was NOT a far-sighted idea for a company that is located in Buffalo.... The cooling is AC condenser assisted during the summer (I think its scheduled for July 18-20 this year). We have attained an Energy Efficiency of 83-85% utilizing this method (if you paid what we pay for electricity in NY, you would turn off that light bulb also).

[cp256]

The planet is supposed to cool until around 2030. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it is a basic compound of life on this planet. Stop wasting time, money and effort on a scam to enrich Algore and GE.

[flickrz]

Yeah, CO2 is not a pollutant. Why don't you try inhale it that comes from your car exhaust?

[why do i need a name?]

flickrz - because your exhaust contains a lot more than CO2, most notably CO which is toxic. Of course you knew that, but were trying to be cute. <br /><br />And by the way, read the latest data, the planet is cooling, has been for 10 years in spite of CO2 emissions. oops, the kind of inconvenient truth that Al Gore doesn't want you to know. There is plenty of science out there that refutes the warming theories.

[swanky303]

Per Wikipedia:<br /><br />Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. General scientific opinion is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the 20th century

[gerrrg]

The Earth is not cooling; this is a popularly misquoted information. Like the stock market, if you only peer at a portion of the data, you might believe that the Earth is cooling, but look at the wider trend, and you can see that in fact it is warming:<br /><br />http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A4.lrg.gif<br />http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A3.lrg.gif<br />http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Top10.warmest.doc

[why do i need a name?]

swanky, if you want to believe wikipedia, go ahead. remember the source.<br /><br />gerrg, there's plenty of data on the other side. Since you provied three, here's three more for you<br /><br />http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html#mod=djempersonal<br />http://www.drroyspencer.com/<br /><br />and the news this past week that the EPA squashed an internal report that said just that, that the earth was cooling. It didn't fit their "policy directions" so they told the guy who was working on it to go do something else and to stop. <br /><br /><br />Finally, EVEN IF the planet is warming, who says that the climate that we have today is "normal" or if we're on our way to or from what was normal for the past thousand years? There is significant data that temperature drives CO2, not CO2 drives temperature (i.e. which one lags and which one leads) And you want to allow Gore and his buddies to destroy Billions in the name of junkscience? no thanks, I'm not buying it.

[CTO_Dude]

If your argument is true and the Earth isnt warming, why is it a good idea to spew ANYTHING into the atmosphere if you dont have to? Gas, for example, is not infinite and if it were, we'd still be getting it out of the ground in Pennsylvania like we used to back in the 1800's. Why is it possibly a bad idea to use less energy and put less emissions OF ANY SORT into the atmosphere? These new datacenters attempt to do just that... namely use less water, less electricity and less air handling to get the same computational power.

[Marcus Westrup]

The comment that gets me, was how they "borrowed" the idea from someone else and now want to patent it.

[jemiller0]

Sounds like a heat pump to me. Not sure how they'll patent that.

[gerrrg]

I believe this is the patent:<br /><br />http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&#38;Sect2=HITOFF&#38;d=PALL&#38;p=1&#38;u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&#38;r=1&#38;f=G&#38;l=50&#38;s1=7430118.PN.&#38;OS=PN/7430118&#38;RS=PN/7430118

[PhaseDMA]

Lockport. Not Rockport. Good luck finding "Rockport" anywhere in NY state. It isn't going to happen.

[Tom Krazit]

Thanks. Yahoo's original press release said it would be in Buffalo, and there was some confusion about the correct town.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

Carbon is the element found on Mars that causes cooling, hence the extremely low high daily temps. found on that planet.<br /><br />Sulfur is the element that creates the greenhouse effect that allows heating. Venus has this.<br /><br />This's stupid for Yahoo to do. Or any company. Marxist is America are green, not red. And it's now called global whining.

[ajsmeeeeeee]

Wow, I never realized this! I always thought Mars was cooler because it was really far away from the sun and venus was hotter because it was really close.<br /><br />But hang on a minute, why is it hotter when I get near my fire.<br /><br />Anyway, serious BtmnHatesRbn, Venus is hot because it has a significant and dense atmosphere full of greenhouse gases (including sulphur you got that bit right) and is close to the sun.<br /><br />Mars is cool because it is small, thus less of a gravitational field to maintain an atmosphere and have a significant greenhouse effect, and is farther away from the sun than venus.<br /><br />As for your third point, global warming or not, using less electricity saves money so being efficient is a bonus for any company.<br /><br />Here is a piece of advice "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt"

[ellsanto]

Dude, that looks like Jon Edwards standing next to Chuckie S!! Who let him out of the democratic underworld? Maybe it is his evil twin...er...make that his good twin.

[donsms]

What ever happened to Global Dimming?

[LuvThatCO2]

Energy efficiency is one thing. Its a great way for companies to save money and remain competitive. But if they are flushing their money away for the purpose of being 'carbon neutral' to fight the 'global warming' fairy tale, then maybe its that sort of thinking thats been sending Yahoo down the tubes in the first place.

[atmuscarella]

One reason they choose Lockport was because NY State is selling them low cost hydro power from Niagara Falls. Which is why they no longer need to worry about carbon credits they are buying cheep green power.

[gggg sssss]

Carbon offsets are just plain Fraud. If Berbie Madof were younger he, like Al Gore is now, would have gone into the carbon offset buiness. Even better than a Ponzi scheme. YOU NEVER HAVE TO GIVE THE MONEY BACK.

[DCpowergirl]

Another way to increase energy efficiency at any data center, and save billions of dollars a year, is to distribute reliable DC (direct current) electricity ? instead of AC (alternating current) ? throughout the facility. This will not only reduce the electrical power losses that are the result of multiple AC-DC conversions, but it will also reduce the loads needed for cooling the system and cut down on floor space demand. The seamless integration of solar, wind or any other renewable power source (all of which produce DC power) is an added benefit of using a DC architecture at a data center.

[open-mind]

Only a small fraction of global warming is from carbon dioxide, and only a small fraction of that is made from combustion, and only a small fraction of that combustion happens in the USA, and only a small fraction of that combustion can be realistically eliminated. So lets tax the crap out of carbon-dioxide to achieve an insignificant result and destroy what's left of the US economy. Meanwhile China is building coal-electric plants as fast as possible, and Al Gore is making millions on the hysteria.<br /><br />Carbon credits are a crock. You're being manipulated folks. And if not, since water-vapor is a worse global warming gas than carbon dioxide, maybe we should declare water a pollutant and start taxing that too.