Wind Power Picks Up Speed at Other World Computing

WOODSTOCK, IL — With the installation of a 500 kilowatt wind turbine on its manufacturing facility, Other World Computing says it is the world's first 100 percent wind-powered IT company.

The wind turbine will generate an estimated 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year, which is more than double the amount OWC says it needs to power its LEED Platinum facility and data center; as a result, the company will be sold back to its electric utility.

Although the ROI on the project is a relatively long 10-14 years based on current energy costs, there are added reasons for investing, the company's CEO said.

"I made the decision to 100 percent self-fund this project because of the conservational benefits as well as the future cost of energy," Larry O'Connor said in a statement. "With the kilowatt hour rate in the Chicago market up 24.3 percent since 1999, it only makes sense to use technology to lower our usage and costs related to traditional power sources."

The wind turbine is the latest addition to the company's plans for LEED platinum certified campus; OWC's headquarters is in the final stage of certification for the award. The company has also installed a geothermal heat pump system, high insulation materials throughout the building, smart energy controls for unused rooms, waterless urinals and incentives for employees to commute to work by bicycle.

And OWC isn't the only tech firm to announce wind-related achievements in recent days, albeit on a much larger scale. Earlier this week, web hosting company Bounceweb announced that it had purchased enough wind energy credits to completely offset the company's greenhouse gas emissions, making the firm in essence carbon-neutral.

The move follows earlier purchases of RECs for the Houston, Texas-based web hosting firm, as well as optimizing its web servers to cut energy use by 43 percent.

The two announcements are a reversal of the recent "Green IT 2.0" trend of using green IT technologies to reduce the carbon footprint of other areas of business operations, whether through building energy management systems, logistics, supply chain operations or almost any other area.

But recent research suggests that, while it may still be a few years away, renewable energy will become more common for powering data centers. In the meantime, several data centers have begun exploring how wave power can be used to keep the servers running and cool.