Germany’s shift from large-scale, centralized power generation to a decentralized system geared towards the large-scale integration of renewable energy has been under way for many years now. Utilities like SWW have been adapting their business models to the increasing infeed of wind and solar power since the late 1990s. This development was accelerated in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, when the government decided to phase out all nuclear plants by the end of 2022.
The EU’s internal energy market director as well as the Polish minister of the environment and his Japanese colleague are among the distinguished visitors to have signed the guestbook, and many more groups come almost daily to witness the future of what some have termed Germany’s energy turnaround. “I don’t really like that term,” Krasser admits. “We aren’t turning anything around at all, and we certainly aren’t turning back. We’re making a transition to a better future.”
Month: February 2018
Big data, big business – ABB Conversations
Data centers are among the fastest growing elements of the information age.Loosely described, a data center is a large shell with a tightly controlled environment filled with interlinked computers. Collectively, the world’s data centers hold the servers that power the information cloud used billions of times a day by everything from cell phones to company computers to home security systems.The world’s centers are expected to serve more than 20 billion “connected devices” by 2025, up from an estimated 8 billion today. Already in 2016, the world’s data centers processed 7,744 tweets per second, along with 62,388 Google searches and more than 2.6 million emails. Internet traffic alone has surpassed 1 billion terabytes – enough to process about 5,000 times the words ever spoken by mankind.All of that data, of course, rides on electricity, and ABB is here to give it the road to travel on.