This week, I am excited to be speaking on Challenges, Solutions & Opportunities in Green ICT at the annual Prompt Symposium in Montreal. One solution I will talk about is building datacenters near low-carbon power sources.
Datacenters require a lot of power to operate. In fact, in 2005, datacenters world-wide used the same amount of power as that produced by seventeen 1000 MW power plants. Because they use so much power, data centers have a substantial carbon footprint (one moderate server can produce the same carbon emissions as an SUV running at 15 mpg) – and this footprint is made worse by the fact that so much of the electricity used to power datacenters is produced by burning coal.
Coal-fired electrical generation creates the highest levels of CO2 emissions of all of the power sources, as this chart shows:
Data source: Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology – UK &* European Data – 2004-2006
About 50% of the electricity in the United States is created using coal. But there are alternatives. Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, for example, all rely primarily on hydro-electric power*, with natural gas providing peak-time generation as needed. And all of these provinces emit less than 20 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour. West Virginia and Illinois, on the other hand, rely almost exclusively on coal to produce their electricity, and they emit over 1000 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour.
Sources: Stats Canada, Environment Canada, US Department of Energy
This means that a datacenter located in Quebec or BC has a carbon footprint that is 50 times less than that of the same datacenter in West Virginia or Illinois. With advanced network technology and extensive fiber optic networks, it is quite possible to locate datacenters in these favorable locations while allowing businesses to operate as normal.
So if a business wants to make an immediate difference in the effort to curb climate change, they can do so easily: they just need to choose a datacenter located in the right place.
* It is important to note that datacenters require a very stable power source. Wind and solar power both have a very low carbon footprint, but since both are influenced by the weather, they may not be sufficiently reliable to provide the sole power source for a datacenter. They can, however, provide a valuable supplement to other low-carbon power sources.
About Brian Fry
Brian is a driving force behind the development of Canada's first truly "green" datacenter, RackForce's GigaCenter in Kelowna, BC. This facility, engineered with input from IBM's Big Green team and powered by a hydro-electricity, delivers large-scale, technologically-advanced infrastructure for disaster recovery, colocation, and cloud/virtualization computing demands, and it sets the standard for green datacenters.
Brian launched his first technology company in Vancouver in 1985, and spent the Internet boom years in California. In 1997, Brian and his family left the traffic and pollution of California behind and returned to the safe, clean and green interior of BC. Brian became a partner in PowerLink Internet Services, which quickly grew into one of the largest ISPs in British Columbia, and was sold to Internet Direct in 1999. A short time later, Brian co-founded IPWorld Networks with Tim Dufour. This established a successful partnership, and in 2001, Brian and Tim co-founded RackForce. Brian and Tim have created a company that has significant business relationships with IBM and Microsoft, and that provides environmentally sustainable Dynamic Datacenter Services to a world-wide customer base. Brian is an outdoor enthusiast, and his passion for skiing and hiking reinforces his commitment to Green IT.
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