America’s military should wean itself off oil by 2040 in order to end the high vulnerability of its fuel supply to attack and price spikes, according to a new report. The U.S. Department of Defense currently relies on petroleum for about 77 percent of its energy needs, including aircraft, ground transportation, ships, and weapons, according to the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan group based in Washington, D.C. That reliance makes the U.S. military vulnerable to extreme fuel price spikes as the global market competes for increasingly depleted petroleum supplies, the report said. “Ensuring that DOD can operate on non-petroleum fuels 30 years from today is a conservative hedge against prevailing economic, political and environmental trends, conditions and constraints,” the authors say.

While that shift will likely take decades, the report says the Defense Department has already established the groundwork, including significant development and testing of numerous renewable sources of energy. The report offered the military 12 guiding principles to make the transition to renewable sources of energy, including steadily increasing the use of renewable fuels at domestic military installations, improving energy efficiency, planning for an uncertain and unstable energy future, and developing new, non-petroleum fuels to use in existing equipment.

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The AFCOM association recently revealed the results of a survey of 436 data center sites that showed the following trends: Cyber terrorism is an increasing concern, mainframe deployment is declining, storage deployment is increasing, and “green” technologies are definitely happening.

AFCOM found that there is a shift in data centers away from mainframe computers and toward other types of servers. That makes total sense as virtualization is the mantra of the day for those companies that are interested in optimizing their power by having several operating systems function within just one server. Data processing and storage is done within one server as opposed to a traditional system where the network is distributed in an elaborate design comprising of several servers and workstations all attached to their own separate hardware components. Similar to a virtual environment, all the physical resources such as additional servers, PCs, storage, hard drives, processors, and mother boards are totally eliminated. That way, not only are we saving big time in hardware investment (good for the planet!), we are also avoiding excess maintenance costs. That’s a big thumbs up!

The “not so thumbs up “ news is that even though 60.9 percent of data centers worldwide officially recognize cyber terrorism as a real threat, only about one-third of respondents included cyber terrorism in their disaster-recovery plans. The survey goes on to note that currently only about one of every four data centers addresses cyber terrorism, and one in five has procedures in place to prevent an attack. That means the remaining four out of five data centers are left dangerously vulnerable to sophisticated malwares and viruses.

The risk of cyber attacks becomes more critical as several data centers expect massive expansion due to dramatic increase in storage demands and aggressive business plans in the next five years. The AFCOM study finds that 22.0 percent will utilize a colocation center to meet their increased space requirements and 13.8 percent will use managed Hosting services. Companies will also rely more and more on cloud computing services to meet their increasing computing needs that cannot be totally met with onsite especially if they are cash strapped.

Cloud computing – cutting costs and energy

Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud technology as a part of their initiative to cut costs and energy. How does it work? Computational power and storage borrowed from a third party decreases the power load on the home front. You pay for what you use and waste fewer resources in the bargain. You eliminate redundant power, redundant servers, spare capacity, fail-over processes, backup servers etc and equipment never gets outdated. Services on the host side, run on shared infrastructure at high utilization as not all users will be accessing service at the same time which means there is further potential for power savings.

While some argue that cloud computing just shifts the energy consumption from the data centers to the hosts’ side, even with all the additional overhead costs and single computer power usage (on the host side) , there is a considerable decrease in net power as you take other systems offline and pay a whole lot less for cooling.

Highly specialized energy saving environments that are carefully cultivated by big players like Amazon and Microsoft are likely to waste considerably less energy than the clients who seek their cloud services.

Security concerns

But the big elephant in the room when it comes to cloud computing has always been security concerns as you let go of sensitive client data over an open network. Remote computing increases the risk of breaches. This was recently brought to the forefront with Google’s well documented case when a hacker got hold of confidential Twitter documents after breaking into an employee’s e-mail account. Certainly Google has been exceptional in embracing green computing and proclaims to run the most energy-efficient data centers in the world. But are we willing to ease up on the security of confidential data to get our carbon limits under control?

Organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance, comprising of industry leaders, global associations and security experts, have published guidance to come up with secure cloud computing practices and have released guidelines that cover 15 security domains, ranging from computing architecture to virtualization for organizations. Just like any other emerging technology, there are certain matters that require meticulous ironing out. I’m optimistic that we will be able to make cloud work as we cannot ignore the business benefits that it brings us (lots of cash savings!) while keeping our individual and collective carbon limits under check.

Dilip Tinnelvelly is VP of Technology and Product Management at ChannelVission Inc., a global business development company specializing in channel sales & marketing services for the information technology industry.

photo: purpleslog

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Some projects are just too big to let the private sector handle them alone. Updating our aging one-way system of centralized power production to a smart grid is one of those projects. Left mostly to its own initiative, the energy industry has done very little in technology innovation during the past fifty years to make the grid more efficient and to accommodate distributed power production.

The need is so clear that even a group that supports limited government agrees that building a smart grid that conserves energy, integrates renewables, and diminishes peak power requires the guiding hand of the federal government.

The Lexington Institute has published a paper that neatly summarizes the smart grid challenges, and concludes that “Just as the grid of today required presidential initiative, the smart grid will take a high-level policy push, too.” The public policy research group, which says it “actively opposes the unnecessary intrusion of the federal government into the commerce and culture of the nation,” adds that “Smart grid will most likely require federal, state and local government incentives” and that “Policy action is worthwhile to move promising technologies closer to full adoption.”

The “Moving Forward on Smart Grid” report cites the Rural Electrification Project of the 1930’s as a success story where the federal government helped to bring electricity to farms.

The Lexington Institute’s seemingly contradictory position on government intervention is understandable given its energy independence/security and climate concerns. And the logic is sound. The demand for energy is likely to increase by 40 percent by 2030, and the choice is to either greatly increase efficiency while adding renewable power, or to plan on building hundreds more coal and nuclear power plants.

Utilities, whose business model has traditionally been to increase revenue by selling more power, will not change behaviors without federal incentives. Many utilities are in the midst of rollouts of thousands of smart meters to enable commercial and residential customers to manage their energy consumption. Federal grants, such as the Recovery Act funds, are enabling energy efficiency projects. For example, the Mississippi Development Authority, in partnership with smart grid company, SmartSynch, is installing smart meters at 1,500 state-run public facilities.

Also instrumental in prompting utility action are the investment tax credits and loan guarantees. Loan guarantees for energy efficiency make fiscal sense because the loans can be repaid through savings. One option would be to allow utilities to provide smart meters to customers, and instead of permanent rate hikes, have temporary rate increases that wouldn’t raise customer’s monthly bills above present levels as long as the expected reduction in consumption is met. Then, after the equipment is paid off, rates can be lowered.

Also, to get hundreds of power producers and sellers to design equipment that will work together requires federally mandated standards, and that process is already underway.

Appearing courtesy of Matter Network.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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George Soros, one of the world’s most successful investors and boldest philanthropists, has been more perceptive than almost anybody on the economic crisis – warning about “market fundamentalism” and the emerging credit “superbubble” since the 1980s. “The idea that financial market are self-correcting,” Soros writes, “remains the prevailing paradigm.” And it is wrong.

Rather than thinking markets are always right, Soros thinks of markets as “almost always wrong” – and has made billions by trading on this insight.

Now nearing 80, Soros’ observations carry more weight than ever. The new edition of The Crash of 2008: the new Paradigm for Financial Markets is Soros’ 11th book – and his first bestseller. In it he explains his theory and argues that clean energy investments are central to macroeconomic policy.

Soros’ theory – called reflexivity – states that human events are inherently unpredictable because people’s perceptions affect the underlying reality of the situation. For example, stock prices at any given moment more accurately reflect the prevailing bias of the market – greed or fear on the extremes -  than the underlying value of the company.

Soros, an early Obama supporter, has generally supported the president’s policies on stimulus, bank intervention, and clean energy legislation. “Energy policy could play a much more innovative role in counteracting both recession and deflation,” Soros argues. “The American consumer can no longer act as the motor of the global economy. A new motor is needed. Alternative energies and energy savings could serve as that motor, but only if the price of conventional fuels is kept high enough to justify investing in them. That might also help to moderate price deflation.”

“Neither energy security nor the control of global warming can be achieved without putting a price on carbon emissions,” Soros writes. “The United States cannot do it alone, but it cannot be done without the United States taking the lead.”

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