The how-to book for building data centers and buying energy to run them was only written over the past 17 years or so. The process continues, of course, but whatever has been written so far has been done by a handful of key companies and key people that have worked there. One of the people that had to make it up as they went along was KC Mares.

Mares is well-known in the data center industry for his work as chair of the data center efficiency program at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), a prominent high-tech industry organization founded in the late 1970s by HP’s David Packard. He is one of the industry’s most vociferous spokespeople for energy efficiency and sustainability. There are two reaons he speaks out. The first is his concern for the environment; the second is that since the late 1990s he has directed the way some of the high-tech world’s biggest names have bought and used energy.

Mares directed energy management at Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s, led Yahoo!’s data center strategy in 2007 and 2008 and, as director of energy, saw Exodus Communications, the company that arguably started the colocation business, balloon and burst together with the dot-com bubble. He has overseen operations of Google’s first company-owned dedicated data center and consulted Equinix on energy procurement for data centers and energy efficiency. The list goes on.

Christina Page, global director of Yahoo!’s energy and sustainability strategy and his former colleague, says Mares is as good at practicing data center energy efficiency as he is at being a public spokesman for it, always making sure to link back to sustainability instead of just focusing on the economics. “He’s got a genuine love and concern for the environment,” she says.

A lot of land, a lot of power

Mares’ latest project is Reno Technology Park (RTP), a massive data center park under development in Nevada, promising customers long-term renewable and natural-gas-fueled power purchase agreements for very low rates (see box-out p24). He is CTO and one of four primary partners in Unique Infrastructure Group, the project’s developer.

RTP has a unique pitch for data centers, offering connections to a wide variety of energy sources, including renewable energy at low rates. Tenants can either negotiate their own power purchases or have the park's developers help them. Read about Reno Technology Park in detail here.

At the time of our interview with Mares – May 2012 – construction had commenced on a number of data centers at RTP for end-users that had signed up. Earlier this week, Apple became the first company to start a data center project there whose name was made public.

While the park is being heavily marketed for data center use, it is not only for data centers. The team has had discussions with manufacturers of electric-vehicle batteries, chip fabricators and other high-tech businesses. It really is suitable for any energy-intensive business that needs a reliable power supply, Mares says.

Shifting the real cost of coal

A large portion of the fuel mix behind power RTP offers is natural gas, whose abundance in the US today has made it very cheap.

Mares is a strong believer in the future of natural gas, which has a lot to do with the looming shut-down of a big chunk of all coal-fired generation capacity in the US. This prediction comes from a 2010 report by Bernstein Research. It concludes that 15% of all coal capacity may come offline by 2015, and, taking into account the amount of new coal plants expected to come online within that timeframe, coal-fueled generation in the country may fall by a net 9%.

This is because there are new federal coal-plant pollution regulations and a lot of old coal-fired plants. Utilities would rather shut these plants down than pay to upgrade them to comply with the regulations. Jon Koomey, consulting professor at Stanford University and expert on energy-use and its impact on the environment, says these plants are not as efficient as the latest coal plants will be. “They’re being run because they’re cheap to run,” he says. That is, they’re cheap to run to the utilities, while imposing health costs on society. “Utilities aren’t paying that price,” Koomey says. It is “the old people and the little kids who are paying now. If you make the utilities pay, they’ll start cleaning up their act.”

Regardless of which side of the pollution-regulation issue you’re on, the US is about to lose a lot of its current generation capacity. Fewer coal-fired plants may translate into higher energy rates, Mares says, which is why the abundance of natural gas is so attractive. “Gas is our best bet for some time to come,” he says.

Both Mares’ and Koomey’s relationship with coal – and with each other – goes back to the late 90s. The two took part in a campaign to discredit a set of false claims about the Internet’s energy use put forth by the coal lobby that had snowballed into popular wisdom. Koomey took part as a researcher and Mares as a high-level employee at Exodus, then the world’s largest data center company.

‘Bad statistics run amok’

This was a case of what Koomey calls “bad statistics run amok” in his book titled Turning numbers into knowledge. People behind the bad data had concluded that computers, IT equipment and the Internet used 13% of all US electricity at the time and would use half of all electricity within the following 10-20 years. These claims were publicized in a Forbes Magazine article by Peter Huber and came out of a pseudo-scientific study by Mark Mills. Both were co-authors of a monthly investment newsletter called Digital Power Report. The study was published by the Greening Earth Society, which according to numerous sources was created by the Western Fuels Association, a self-described cooperative that supplied coal and transportation services to electric utilities.

Intent of the study and of the Forbes article is clear from the article’s headline: Dig more coal – the PCs are coming. It was basically a publicity campaign to make people believe that if the Internet was to continue developing, it would require more and more coal-fueled energy generation, Koomey says. Because Forbes was a reputable publication and because the numbers were so sensational, they were picked up by other mass media without really questioning the source. They were used in investment-bank reports, congressional testimony, etc. “All these high-level people in business and in government were relying on false numbers,” Koomey says. “It was this big mess of this high-profile repetition.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paid Koomey and a small group of scientists to dig into the report’s claims. Once they did, they found a string of consistent exaggerations of energy-use data in calculations. “They had exaggerated in every single case,” Koomey says.

At the time, Mares was director of energy at Exodus. About one-third of all internet traffic went through the company’s infrastructure, he says. Naturally, he had a pretty good idea of what it took to power the Internet. In fact, Mills and Huber came to him once as they did research for their study because he was an expert. They shared their numbers with him and he told them they were way off, he remembers. “KC was very forthcoming about what [Exodus] were actually using and was puzzled by their data,” Koomey says. Mares’ advice was ignored, however, and the study was published.

In the EPA-funded “counter-study”, led by Koomey, the researchers used Mares’ energy-use data collected at Exodus as one of the data sources. “KC was one of the people who had real data that we could bring to bear on the question,” Koomey says. What came out of this effort was the infamous 2007 EPA report on data center energy use, widely cited to this day. It concluded that data centers used about 1.5% of all energy consumed in the US, that data center energy use had doubled between 2000 and 2006 and could double again by 2011.

Powering a giant

Mares spent about 15 months at Exodus, before the company went bankrupt in 2001 – when the dot-com bubble burst. Its assets were sold and re-sold, eventually ending up under the ownership of Savvis (now subsidiary of the US telco CenturyLink).

Around the time of the Forbes controversy, Exodus was under attack for its energy use. There were energy crises around the country – including the infamous 2000 California energy crisis – and the Internet industry, growing as fast as it was, caught a lot of the blame. As the largest data center provider, Exodus was in the cross-hairs.

At the same time, the company was facing power-inventory issues. Janice Fetzer, who was then VP of project development and facilities at Exodus, says growing internet giants were desperate for data center space and power, and Exodus was having a hard time keeping up with demand. “Yahoo! was new. Google was new. Microsoft Hotmail was new,” she says. “They were all our clients. It was a land-grab inside the data center. It was crazy. We couldn’t build them fast enough. They would just jam servers in and take the covers off the servers and heat up the place, and they would get mad at each other for heating up each other’s cage.”

Today we know what caused the energy crises of the 2000s and have a better idea of how much energy the Internet really consumes. Back then, nobody knew. For Exodus, data center energy use was turning into both an operational issue as well as a public-relations one, Fetzer says. She hired Mares to help take care of both.

From his past energy procurement work at Sun Microsystems, Mares knew the energy market inside-out. Once on board, he made Exodus not just an energy customer but a partner with utilities, he says.

Mares’ negotiations with the energy market went beyond just getting the lowest rates. He pushed them to disclose how much generation capacity they had and where on the grid that capacity was, finding strong points on the grid and, at the same time, sharing real data about Exodus’ energy use, turning the negotiations into a much more transparent exchange on both sides.

By the time Exodus’ COO came to Mares and said the company was filing for bankruptcy, Exodus had more than 40 data centers around the world. The COO asked him to be part of the team that would take the company through the process three months before the bankruptcy papers were filed. Mares agreed, thinking it would make for a good learning experience, which meant he would be one of the people responsible for breaking the news to the remaining customers, vendors and investors, and preparing for whatever backlash was to follow.

The bankruptcy did end up being a learning experience. The two main lessons learned, he says, were not to overbuild (make sure your data center development pipeline is in line with revenue), and keep communication lines open between leaders of the company’s businesses and executive team. Mares says he and another key manager did warn that its growth plans were not prudent but got pushback. “That was not what they wanted to hear,” he says.

A little on truth

Making prudent, data-based decisions, or statements are key characteristics of Mares, Koomey says. “Getting the numbers right really does matter,” he writes in his book. “No good can come of incorrect information being widely accepted.” Mares takes this concept to heart, and people notice. “He makes sure that when he says something, it’s tied to reality and not theory,” Koomey says about Mares. “Not everyone is like that, and it’s something I admire in people.”

Today, Mares believes you do not have to pay a premium if you want to run a data center on renewable energy. And he knows exactly how and where it can be done.

Before and after Exodus

After it declared itself bankrupt, Exodus was acquired by Cable & Wireless, and Mares stayed on the buyer’s payrol. Exodus’ high-profile customers, such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, took over many of the company’s data centers, Fetzer says. She left the company before Mares did, eventually ending up at Redundant Networks, a small data center startup that had built one data center in Reno.

In July 2002, a few months after he finally left Cable & Wireless, Mares came to Reno to join Fetzer at Redundant Networks as director of operations. Investors in Redundant eventually decided to get out of the data center business and sold the Reno facility to BEA Systems, a provider of enterprise application infrastructure solutions, now a subsidiary of Oracle. After helping with the facility’s sale, Mares left, going on to manage operations at a Google data center. Less than one year later, however, in January 2005, he joined BEA to manage its global labs and data centers.

His work with data centers and energy really started in 1998 at another company now owned by Oracle: Sun Microsystems. As director of energy, he was instrumental in integrating Sun’s many data centers and labs into a few large facilities. Mares spearheaded a number of other improvements to the way the company used energy. One he is especially proud of is installation of hundreds of Ethernet-enabled energy meters at all Sun sites that fed real-time energy-use data to the utilities through the Internet. This was a very cutting-edge approach to energy management at the time, giving both the utilities and the company a clear idea of Sun’s energy use, as well as up-to-date monitoring for availability of grid-power at the sites.

From grid to chip

While busy with RTP, Mares is still an active member of SVLG. He is also keeping his consulting business Megawatt Consulting alive and advising two Silicon Valley startups and the University of Nevada Reno’s College of Engineering. One firm he’s advising is Green Platform, a company promising big energy savings from its data center rack that reduces vibration in storage arrays. The other, Calxeda, manufactures ARM processors –low-power ARM chips typically found in mobile devices that have lately seen some interest from server vendors. Both Dell and HP are developing ARM-based server products, the latter using Calxeda chips.

He likes his grid sustainable and his chips low-power. As for coal, he don’t dig it!

This article first appeared in FOCUS magazine. To register for FOCUS digital editions, click here.