Yahoo Designs and Builds Wind-Cooled Data Center

In an attempt to cut down electricity costs for its data centers, Yahoo decided to create an eco-friendly design largely based on wind-power for cooling the servers. The plan worked, and they now need to pay only one cent for cooling for every dollar spent on electricity.

The energy-efficient data center is located in Lockport, New York, and it is placed in an area surrounded by lakes, where winds are powerful enough to be exploited in this manner.

It seems that the Sunnyvale-based company was inspired by the design of chicken coops where the air typically moves through the building naturally.

The same applies to a building full of servers which needs to be cooled down so that the machines keep functioning properly.

However, since they were dealing with hardware instead of fowl, Yahoo had to come with a customized version of the chicken coop, in other words, had to create one themselves (the idea is new, so there was no model that could be applied).

Basically, the 155,000-square-foot Lockport facility will be partly-powered by the water energy produced nearby, while the 50,000 servers it supports will be cooled using the aforementioned wind, without requiring the air conditioning units to function at full capacity as is the case with other centers.

It appears that the resulting data center will be as efficient as expected, since, according to the company's officials, it will use 40 percent less energy and 95 percent less water than conventional data centers.

If one believes that Yahoo stroke gold with this idea, it should be mentioned that the investments were considerable as well: $150 million spent on the actual project, of which $9.9 million came from a grant from the US Department of Energy.

Overall, it seems that, besides the obvious cost reduction reasoning, large companies have started to develop a tendency to choose alternative energy over the traditional one.

Another Internet giant that invested heavily into reducing its carbon footprint onto the nature is Google, that took out $38.8 million from its budget for a wind farm project, earlier this year.

We can only hope that the efforts of Google and Yahoo will also inspire other large companies into using green energy for their business.