Offering something a little more positive in green data center news than what’s been going on lately between Greenpeace and Facebook, Yahoo is opening a new data center using their patent-pending Chicken Coop design.

The facility is in upstate New York and the neatest thing about it is that because of the clever design, it will only end up using 1% of its total energy bill on cooling.  Most of its cooling will be done by outside air - even the winds of the area are being harnessed to cool the equipment instead of chillers.

It’s a 50,000 server facility and will be using just over half the energy an average data center uses, for an expected PUE of 1.08.  It’s so efficiency-forward that it was funded in part by a grant from the Department of Energy.

See more on CNET.

Elizabeth English

photo by furtwangl under flickr creative commons license