Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge

reports that

Phoenix IT infrastructure provider i/o Data Centers

is installing a huge array of solar panels on the 11-acre roof of its new Phoenix ONE data center. The company says the photovoltaic panels will generate up to 4.5 megawatts of power to supplement the energy needs of the massive facility.

The installation planned for Phoenix ONE will dwarf all previous efforts to integrate solar power into a working data center. Its output will be nearly three times the 1.6 megawatts produced by the solar panels covering the roof of the Googleplex.

The first phase of 5,000 solar panels in Phoenix is scheduled to be operational in January, and will generate 500 kilowatt-peak (kWp), the company says. The array will be expanded in four additional phases during 2010 to reach a total capacity of 4.5 megawatts-peak.

That’s just a fraction of the 80 megawatts of power capacity that the 538,000 square foot Phoenix ONE data center will need upon completion. The solar power is also expensive, costing about 18 cents per kilowatt hour to generate in a market where grid power is 7 cents.

However, there’s more cleverness and  cost-savings afoot – and Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge explains some of it in his post Solar Power at Data Center Scale. Read the rest of it there.

Thanks to Preston Gralla of Greener Computing for spotting this and reporting it in his post Will Your Next Data Center Be Solar Powered?

The takeaway for disaster planners is this: if an entire data center can be powered by solar – we can certainly power cloud networks, radio over IP, and enough bandwidth to run, for instance, Sahana, and copper-pair phone lines to keep communications going – on and off the net during emergencies