Intel Corp., a San Jose, Calif.-based chip company, today announced a range of low-power chips aimed at driving down the power requirements inside data centers. Among them were two new Xeon 3400 chips; a version that consumes only 45 watts will be released this year while the company is going to start selling a 30-watt version in 2010.

“This is a brand-new segment for us,” said Sean Maloney, executive vice president at Intel, which also announced a new Microserver reference design that would allow hardware makers to cram as many as six low-power Xeons into a single 1u rack — which translates into about 228 servers per cabinet. The servers are targeted at providers of web services, Intel said.

Maloney pointed out that in a few years, power is going account for nearly 25 percent of a data center’s costs — a situation Intel, with these new chips, is looking to address. Intel has already started shipping these chips to its OEM partners, such as Silicon Graphics. (More details on Intel’s web site.)

Research group The Information Network predicts that:

”The solar panel market will reach only 7.1 GWatts in 2009, equivalent to a global growth rate of 26 percent, down from a 48 percent growth in 2008…’Panel prices will likely fall between 20-to-30 percent in 2009 as global supply of polysilicon doubles.”

The demand for solar panels is going to keep increasing. As wireless networks spread to remote parts of the world, a large number of telecom equipment makers are using solar panels to power repeaters, cellular base stations and other parts of the telecom infrastructure.

Among other drivers, the incoming U.S. administration’s eco-centric policies are likely to help keep the demand for alternative energy technologies, such as solar panels, steady.

Related link: Our prior coverage of  solar panels

Happy New Year. As you may have noticed, my byline hasn’t been up for a few days. That’s because the holidays weren’t exactly my most jolly.

I had a heart attack on Dec. 28. I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since. With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK.

To read the rest of the letter, please click here.

In our increasingly digital world, power is one of the main “cost centers” and most large Internet and telecom companies are grappling with this problem in unique sort of ways. Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) are putting their data centers right next to hydroelectric power generation plants in remote locations. British Telecom (BT) is looking at wind power as source of energy.

The UK-based incumbent telecom operator is going to invest close to half-a-billion dollars in wind farms, betting that they will help meet 25% of company’s power needs by 2016. It is one of the largest consumers of power in UK.

BT is one of Britain’s biggest consumers of electricity, with an annual requirement of around 0.7 per cent of the UK’s entire consumption. BT’s wind farms could generate a total of 250MW of electricity – enough to meet the power needs of 122,000 homes or a city the size of Coventry. This would prevent the release of 500,000 tonnes of CO2 each year compared with coal generation – equivalent to a quarter of a million return air trips to New York. [Press Release]

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