PROJECT EASY GREEN

Battery maker Leyden Energy has landed $20 million more in funding and, perhaps more importantly, its products will soon be featured in mainstream consumer goods.

At least one top-tier electronics manufacturer has agreed to insert the company's batteries into a tablet, said vice president of business development Nick Cataldo. Another tablet manufacturer may soon do the same as well.

It's a major step. Most electronics makers prefer to deal with established vendors like Panasonic or Sony. Sometimes, the customer and the battery maker are the same company. Leyden signed production supply agreements last quarter and started shipping products in volume this quarter. It already announced that it was selling batteries for add-on battery packs for notebooks to Canada's Dr. Battery. That was a nice proof point, but getting into finished products is a more impressive step.

The company's total funding now comes to $38 million. NEA became a new investor in this round. Previous investors included Lightspeed Ventures.

The Fremont, California-based company produces lithium-ion batteries with an electrolyte based around a family of salts called IMIDE. Most other batteries use PF6-based electrolytes. While you probably don't know the difference between these chemical families, the difference to a lithium-ion battery is huge, CEO Aakar Patel told us back in May.

The electrolyte — a liquid that carries charges between the anode and cathode in a battery — in standard batteries degrades the cathode over time. The chemical reactions caused by the electrolyte also cause gases to be emitted. These gases, which are contained inside the battery canister, can cause as much as 80 pounds of pressure to build up inside a battery.

Leyden's electrolyte doesn't have the same effect. It can also tolerate high temperatures. The electrolyte can be heated to 300 degrees Celsius. Conventional lithium-ion batteries experience degradation at 80 degrees Celsius, which forces battery makers to keep internal temperatures down in the 40-degrees-Celsius range. Put another way, Leyden's batteries will have the performance of lithium cobalt batteries, the kind found in notebooks, with the safety levels found in lithium phosphate batteries.

"We can pack more active materials into a finite space," he said. "We reduce the gassing through the use of a new salt."

The more inert, less volatile nature of the electrolyte will also allow Leyden to move from making cylindrical batteries with their characteristic hard case to polymer batteries, which are more like flexible sacks filled with chemicals. Polymer batteries give designers freedom to pack battery material into voids and other spaces inside their products. The battery pack can be designed around a car or another product: now, designers have to make sure their designs accommodate the shape of batteries.

Tablets thus make sense as an initial application because space for batteries is confined. Additionally, tablets are relatively new devices and the design conventions haven't yet been set in stone. Cataldo said that over the long term, Leyden will seek out contracts for grid storage.

Some of Leyden's technology comes from a technology license from DuPont, but the company has amplified those core patents with work of its own.

The name comes from a Leyden jar, which stores static electricity. German Ewald Georg von Kleist and Dutch scientist Pieter va Musschenbroek invented it at around the same time in 1745. Musschenbroek worked in Leyden. 

Data centers are an even better bargain than imagined.

A study from Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey says that power consumption in data centers is growing slower than anticipated according to a widely circulated 2007 report from the EPA.

"Electricity used in global data centers likely accounted for between 1.1 percent and 1.5 percent of total electricity use, respectively. For the U.S., that number was between 1.7 percent and 2.2 percent,” the report states. The EPA said power consumption for data centers was closer to 2 percent in 2005 and was then on track to double.

It's good news, and it underscores two things we've been saying here for a while. First, the hand-wringing about data centers is overblown. Online shopping and video conferencing allow individuals and businesses alike to avoid things like unnecessary trips across town — or across the country. Downloading books and music curbs plastic and paper consumption as well as transportation fuel. We think some of the attention on this issue has come from the fact that companies like Facebook are visible targets.

Second, it shows how IT companies are responding with ways to reduce the power bills of data center owners. AMD today launched an effort to see if it's possible to have solar- and wind-powered data centers.

Elsewhere:

–Cree unfurled an LED bulb that generates 1,300 lumens, or 152 lumens per watt. The bulb was created for the L Prize sponsored by the Department of Energy. The results set new records for the category. It was only a few years ago that 100 lumens per watt sounded like a stretch.

–Want to spend $50 million to win $1.3 million? Google and NASA are sponsoring a green flight competition. Those that can build a craft that can fly 200 miles in less than two hours on one gallon of gas (equivalent) per passenger can win $1.3 million.

Sometimes technical contests yield spectacular results, and sometimes they seem to exist solely for fun. We got the first method for measuring longitude out of a 1714 scientific contest. But what about the modern contests? SpaceShipOne won the X Prize for commercial spaceflight a few years back. Burt Rutan, the pilot, stated that the mission could lead to space tourism by 2030. Maybe, maybe not. By contrast, a robotic vehicle sponsored by DARPA lead to a burst of innovation at Stanford. Google has now successfully lobbied to drive robotic cars in Nevada.

Electric planes present a particular challenge because, well, you can get hurt falling out of the sky. Many believe it will be the last segment of transportation that will take advantage of electric power. Still, the results could be surprising, so stay tuned. Here is more.

First we had distributed computing. Then we had distributed power generation.

AMD now wants to cross-breed these concepts in the hope of producing a fossil-free, distributed data center.

The company — in conjunction with Clarkson University, Hewlett-Packard and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) — will conduct a series of experiments to see whether data centers can operate wholly or nearly exclusively on solar, wind and other renewable sources of energy.

Instead of building large, monolithic data centers covering tens of thousands of square feet, AMD will disperse modular computing pods filled with servers, networking boxes and storage systems across a geographic region. These pods will powered by renewable energy plants right next door.

If the wind is strong near a particular data center, intensive computing jobs can be shifted to it. When clouds pass over another, applications can be rolled to another location. To ensure greater power availability, many of the pods will be planted next to wind and solar assets.

“The idea is to shift the compute load from location to location based on the availability of [power] capacity,” said Steve Kester, director of government relations and regulatory affairs at AMD.

Besides curbing energy, this approach will cut infrastructure expenses. It only costs about $15,000 to lay a mile of fiber optic cable to connect a distributed data pod to another and only around $500 to activate a mile dormant or “dark” fiber, he said.

A mile of transmission line runs about $750,000 to $1 million, not including the hours of public hearings involved.

If it works — and it’s still a big if — chasing the weather like this could help put a dent in the ever-growing power diet of computers. Data centers consume around 2 percent of the electricity in the U.S., and in Northern California, the Potomac region and parts of New York, the figure is higher and climbing. Overall, that's not a lot of power, but to those that pay the bills it is becoming a headache. Power can account for around 30 percent of the operating expenses of web companies, second only to personnel.

Green IT has grown rapidly as a result. Some of the leading ideas for curbing power have been weather mapping inside of data centers (Sentilla, SynapSense), application shifting (PowerAssure), improved AC controls (Vigilent), switching from AC to DC power (ABB, GE, Nextek), swapping disks for flash memory (Sandforce), better power conversion (Transphorm), and smaller, more energy efficient servers and chips (SeaMicro, Calxeda).

Geography has been a favorite concept too, but mostly for curbing AC power consumption, not rolling applications to save power. Yahoo built a data center near Lake Erie so that it wouldn’t have to rely on mechanical air conditioning to cool its racks. In Norway and Finland, data centers are being located in mines and underground caves.

HP and Oracle/Sun have both promoted modular data centers as a way to curb energy and construction costs. An HP pod pretty much resembles a storage unit that fits on the back of a tractor-trailer. Both the size and mobility can ease cooling problems.

One of the biggest challenges will be latency. Can a data center manager shift an application from one pod back to another without slowing down performance? Will users experience stalls and hiccups? PowerAssure rolls applications too, but it’s not chasing ever-changing weather patterns and power loads.

A factor that may ameliorate the latency problem is the nature of computing today. Data centers used to tackle complex problems like financial simulations. Now, most servers spend their days coughing up the same, static “About Us,” “Get our iPhone App,” or “You Certify That You Are 18 Years or Older” web pages over and over and over. Caching and other strategies potentially can mask transfer issues.

The planning and testing phase of the project will last 12 to 18 months. If all works well, AMD and its partners will move to small-scale deployments.

SynapSense, which analyzes your data center's energy problems and tries to fix them, has raised $16 million in a third round as interest in green IT continues to grow.

The company essentially monitors weather patterns — heat, pressure, moisture, etc. — in data centers and then provides recommendations on how to curb power consumption and/or use it more effectively. Although Facebook, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and a few others have radically curbed power consumption in their data centers, many such facilities still have air conditioners that gobble up inordinate amounts of power. Sometimes, AC use can account for more than half of the power purchased. Sentilla has also graduated from basic monitoring to automatically controlling cooling systems.

Before this latest round, SynapSense had raised $25 million, which brings the total to $41 million. What does a relatively capital-efficient greentech company like SynapSense do with that kind of money? Probably go shopping. The data center management space is filled with a number of other companies and consolidation is inevitable.

CEO Pete Van Deventer told us last year about a customer that cut its data center power consumption by 10 percent. Another customer was able to garner a $750,000 rebate for retrofitting its data center and managed to cut operating expenses by another $750,000 per year.

"They had a two-month payback," he said. "We are getting into the big banks and tech companies."

Plus, many of the mid-size outfits like SynapSense have some, but not all, of the tools that datacenter managers want. Power Assure, for instance, can monitor and manage power consumption with servers and IT equipment. Sentilla, Vigilent and SynapSense mostly concentrate on air conditioners. Customers want the whole megillah. SynapSense thus will likely try to buy some small outfits to pad its portfolio before Oracle, IBM or HP in turn gobble it up. (This is a movie once saw.)

CrossLink Capital became an investor in this round. Previous investors include Nth Power, General Electric and Bosch.

Elsewhere:

–A trio of congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle want to revive the PACE program for retrofits under the PACE Protection Act of 2011. Using PACE, consumers can retrofit their homes for efficiency and pay off the loan through a supplement on their tax bill. Although several states passed PACE programs and Vice President Joe Biden personally championed PACE as a way to get contractors back to work, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disapproved. The quasi-public agencies worried that such programs would impair the security interest of mortgage holders. (Mortgage holders: you know, those people who are fending off charges for wrongful foreclosure.) The objections effectively killed PACE.

We'd love to see PACE revived. Homes consume about 20 percent of all energy in the U.S. and a good portion of the heating and cooling goes right out the chimney. Congress, however, is in a testy mood and not a lot gets passed these days.

–Toyota has confirmed it will come out with an all-electric RAV4 next year. The car will run on battery packs from Tesla Motors, further cementing a tight relationship between those two companies.

–LED lights aren't just for huge metropolises. Cape Girardeau in Missouri has cut the power needed for its streetlights in half with LEDs. Dialight, a company that got its start making lights for the RAF in WW II, makes the LEDs.

–The EPA and Michael Dell are going to make some sort of announcement on electronic recycling, a sector that is growing by leaps and bounds.

The number of the day is 768.

That is the number of processor cores that SeaMicro has managed to cram into its latest server, boosting its compute-per-watt figure by 20 percent. The elegantly named SM 10000-64HD contains 384 dual-core Intel Atom processors and is the third server from SeaMicro. The last server from the company contained 512 cores, or 256 dual-core Atoms.

SeaMicro's servers consume less than 1/4th the power and take up far less space than conventional servers. Each server, technically speaking, is about the size of a credit card and hundreds of them are crammed into a boxes that fit into server racks.

"Power and space are over 75 percent of your operating expense," CEO Andrew Feldman told us earlier this year. "We've removed 90 percent of the components."

The size and power reductions are possible because of the changing nature of computing. In the past, vendors found it impossible to predict what sort of tasks their machines would be asked to tackle, so they made versatile, all-purpose machines. Now, most servers perform rote functions: serving up pictures of kittens or videos. (And you thought only your job was getting more boring.) As a result, SeaMicro can use an energy-efficient Atom chip, ordinarily used in phones, in its servers and not a power-hogging Xeon.

The other factor is a networking technology invented by SeaMicro. The Atom chips are all connected in a complex three-dimensional torus, a shape that's a cross between a donut and one of the segments of the Michelin Man. The torus allows signals to travel between different chips efficiently. IBM uses a torus in its supercomputers. Thus, although SeaMicro sells servers, it is really a networking company and if it gets bought — a strong likelihood — it could be the networking that is at the core of the transaction.

Data centers only consume around 2 percent of the world's power but customers (e.g., banks, internet companies) are terrified of rising power prices while the IT industry has honed the ability to move quick to capitalize on trends. Thus, IT will be one of the most active green markets over the next several years.

Elsewhere:

–Lowe's will offer the General Electric WattStation EV charger to customers. Lowe's wants to be your energy leader in the home. It also has deals with Sungevity and Westinghouse for solar and Recurve for efficiency retrofits. Lowe's, in fact, invested in both Recurve and Sungevity.

–Prices for rare earth minerals will continue to climb, says Molycorp, which wants to reopen a rare earth mine in California. Worldwide demand will come to 60,000 tons and China will export 30,000 tons, according to the company. China reduced exports by 40 percent last year and may curb exports even more this year. Rare earths are crucial ingredients in magnets for electric motors, wind turbines and other devices. Electric cars contain around 10 pounds of rare earths, a group of 17 elements. China's actions have caused Molycorp's stock to skyrocket because its Mountain Pass mine contains a large quantity of high grade ores. Chevron sold the mine to Molycorp for $80 million in 2008. Now the company is worth billions.

The sudden increase in wealth has allowed Molycorp to buy other companies and move from serving as a miner to a company that processes ores. It will also be part of a joint venture to manufacture magnets with Hitachi here in the U.S. Who says you can make stuff here anymore?

–Cellulosic ethanol and advanced fuels chug on. POET has won a $105 million loan guarantee to build a cellulosic ethanol plant. Cellulosic ethanol relies on wood waste rather than corn and the overall energy balance is expected to be far higher. Meanwhile, OPX Biotechnologies has raised $45 million. OPX wants to make fuel from carbon dioxide with a magic microbe.

–And happy birthday to John Glenn. The U.S. Senator turns 90 today. Back in the '50s, he orbited the globe under the name Ham the Space Chimp.

–Finally, here's a video of SeaMicro's servers:

It seems like just the other day that ABB Group, the global power and automation manufacturer, made another acquisition. Oh wait, it was. On Monday, ABB bought Mincom, which makes software for managing mining operations, for an undisclosed sum.

But the week isn’t over yet. On Thursday, ABB took a controlling interest in Validus DC Systems, which provides direct current power infrastructure for data centers instead of alternating current. ABB has always been in the high voltage DC business, and investing in the Brookfield, CT-based Validus helps them fill out their offerings and make a stronger play in the $24 billion market for telecommunications and data center power infrastructure.

“DC systems provide data centers with a game-changing advantage in both operational and capital cost savings and we believe they will be widely adopted in this energy-intensive industry,“ Tarak Mehta, head of ABB’s Low Voltage Products division, said in a statement. Rumors had swirled for months that Validus was up for sale. The company has worked with IBM, Oracle-Sun and HP. (That's a piece of Validus equipment in the photo.)

A DC-powered datacenter is 10 percent more efficient than a state-of-the-art AC datacenter and 20 percent more efficient than a standard AC datacenter because of the fewer conversions incoming electricity must endure before it powers a server or storage system, Ron Ranaldi, vice president of sales of Validus, told us in a profile of the company in January. Another savings is floor space, as DC datacenters require 25 percent to 40 percent less square footage than their AC counterparts, largely because computer equipment can connect directly to backup batteries.

In a hypothetical example, a 2.5-megawatt datacenter power module in the AC world might need 7,295 square feet, he said. An equivalent DC power module might occupy only 5,102 square feet, a savings of 2,193 square feet. What's more, a single datacenter might consist of several 2.5-megawatt modules.

“Real estate is often greater than the energy savings,” he said. “In large, green field datacenters, you are literally eliminating buildings.”

Facebook bases its Open Computer datacenters around a DC infrastructure. Other DC converts include JPMorgan, Sprint, and Bank of America. SAP also recently redid its Palo Alto headquarters to take DC.

ABB isn’t the only company with an eye on this market. Earlier this year, GE acquired Lineage Power Holdings, a company that specializes in fine-tuning power for servers, storage devices and other equipment inside data centers — including components for DC data centers. Facebook has also invested in DC power for its servers.

The DC shopping spree may not be over, either. Nextek Power Systems makes similar equipment. Nextek also makes equipment to run LED lights off of solar panels in ceilings. Nextek execs tell us that the company frequently gets delegations from Asia to check out the technology.  Schneider Electric, which owns AC powerhouse APC, has yet to buy a DC company. Just a thought. (Recently Redwood Systems has begun to tout itself as a DC company too.)

GE is also interested in exploiting the efficiencies of DC to power large equipment at isolated sites, like mining operations.

ABB bought Ventyx last May for $1 billion. Since then, Ventyx has acquired Obvient, and Mincom, which was also purchased this week, will become a part of Ventyx. ABB also bought electric motor maker Baldor Electric for $4.2 billion and Insert Key Solutions, which specializes in asset management software, in the past year. Schneider Electric, another European conglomerate, has also been on a shopping spree.

At ABB Automation & Power World in April, CEO Joe Hogan — a GE transplant who has engineered the acquisition strategy — said the company was still focused on homegrown R&D, despite the recent rash of acquisitions and investments. But he also noted that when they can acquire the right technologies for the right price, they’ll do so. The financial details of this deal were not disclosed, but it was rumored at less than $15 million with ABB having the option to fully acquire Validus.

So let's count the trends: DC power, increased investment in Green IT, and the European shopping bonanza. That makes three.

***

Michael Kanellos contributed to this article.

A watt of power plugged into a server ultimately turns into a watt of waste heat.

That neat equation is at the basis of the EnviroCube, a novel device from TrendPoint designed to better manage air conditioning in datacenters. It works like this: TrendPoint monitors the power going into various datacenter equipment and the air conditioning system. The data allows it to determine how much heat should be produced and where it will come out. It then cross-checks it against data on the ambient environment to determine cooling efficiency or gaps in a cooling strategy. Most datacenters overcool their servers by a significant margin to make sure the hottest ones farthest away from the vents get the minimal amount of cold air needed, said CEO Bob Hunter.

"A server is a toaster," noted Hunter. "MIPS (millions of instructions per second) per watt keeps going down but total power consumption keeps going up."

The system also anticipates mechanical breakdowns and failures, trimming downtime.

Although some companies have begun to erect datacenters in cold environments to take advantage of chilly winds — Yahoo built one near Lake Erie, for instance — you don't have to move to Buffalo to get better cooling. In 2008, EDS (now part of HP) reconfigured a datacenter in the United Kingdom. One change involved putting AC vents right below each server rack. It cut cooling energy by 30 percent.

Schneider Electric and Computer Associates rebrands and resells TrendPoint's technology, but the company hopes to market equipment under its own brand more in the future.

Elsewhere:

–Facebook has installed the lighting and building management technology from Redwood Systems in its 300,000-square-foot datacenter in Prineville, Oregon. Redwood effectively links LED lights, motion sensors, temperature sensors and other devices with a networking protocol that's similar to power-over-Ethernet. Because lights are evenly spaced out on ceilings, the systems give a somewhat granular view of what's going on inside a building and thus gives managers the opportunity to turn off lights automatically and remotely.

Johnson Controls, one of the leaders in building management, put Redwood's tech in its headquarters. One retailer is looking at it as a way to monitor traffic in stores and at checkout counters, CMO Sam Klepper told us recently. Redwood is a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days. The downside: many people say the technology is somewhat expensive. Klepper says that buyers can achieve a payback in two to five years, but facilities managers (often notorious cheapskates) often claim they want payback on anything new in one year. Leasing and "as a service" business models will likely come to the rescue here.

Under the Open Compute Project, Facebook has designed a server that consumes 38 percent less power than the off-the-shelf models the company previously used, thanks to components like the customized power supply and novel internal fans.

The servers are then housed in datacenters that rely heavily on DC power to cut down on the number of conversions and transformations as a means of saving power. The server plans and datacenter design are both available under an open source license.

–Finally, PowerAssure, one of the better-known specialists in energy management software for datacenters, says it has upgraded its technology to give a finer-grained view of how power gets consumed. PAR4 will provide details on CPU consumption, idle power consumption, etc. In other words, you get a more complete view of power consumption. Early metrics have only tackled single slices of performance, like power consumption in idle mode.

NASA uses Power Assure's services and so has Facebook. The company counts IBM, Cisco, VMWare, Dell and Intel as partners. 

Technologically speaking, Power Assure's services can be viewed as something that helps virtualization. Virtualization allows IT managers to lump applications onto a single piece of hardware to conserve assets and power. Nonetheless, server utilization typically stops at the 10 percent to 20 percent level to accommodate potential spikes in demand.

"Twitter has one of the most aggressive spike curves," CTO Clemens Pfeiffer told us last year. "You have to carry a large buffer."