When Google or Microsoft want to build a server farm they do their best to build their facilities as close to major energy sources as possible. The logic behind building their server farms close to energy sources is relatively simple the power is cheapest closest to the source. Both companies have stated sustainability goals, Google to have all of its power produced by renewable energy sources and Microsoft to become carbon neutral, these sustainability goals, combined with our society's ravenous desire for cloud based services mean that unique solutions for powering server farms will become necessary as time goes on.
Currently the majority of server farms are massive facilities covering thousands of square feet, what I would like to suggest is a complimentary server farm design that is intended to work with more distributed energy sources. Instead of massive facilities organizations could invest in smaller systems designed to be installed right next to large scale wind turbines and solar arrays. Under normal operations the distributed servers would operate at some baseline of data processing, when surplus power is being produced the servers would do scale up how much data they would crunch.
These servers would most likely make the most sense serving as supplemental archival storage capacity and large scale data crunching where the time the processing completion time is more flexible. The utilization of this capacity could be implimented in a range of ways, the servers could be owned out right by either cloud service providers, the power producer, or a 3rd party owner operator.
Hopefully these smaller server arrays would also benefit from increased surface area, said increased surface area would mean more space for hot air to escape, assuming solar gain was not excessive.
Note to self add links for reference.
