Offsetting power costs with power generation

The average data center uses the equivalent of about 2 tons of coal (or 80 barrels of oil) per day; a datacenter with 2,500 servers uses enough electricity in a month to power 420,000 homes for a year. A 30,000 square foot data center with 1,000 racks needs $4.2 million a year to power and cool the computing processing power you are using (including maintenance and amortisation costs).

Those figures are from HP, Sun, the Carbon Trust and Forrester Research, and make disturbing reading.

The result the of last example would also generate 44,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere; in the EU you can offset that using the Emissions Trading Scheme, but it would cost you an additional 700,000 Euros to do so.

Reducing the power consumption is one way to save costs, but how about considering offsetting your power requirement needs by generating your own power?

A wind turbine costs up to $2000 per kilowatt required; although it would be more expensive in the short term (about $15 million for that 1,000 rack datacenter) and you could get that money back in under 10 years, and after that, you'd start saving a considerable amount of money every year.

Even if you are a small company, buying a small wind turbine to offset some of your power generating costs could save you a significant amount over its lifetime.