Last week, I looked at the impact that location and power source can have on the carbon footprint of a datacenter.
As it turns out, Bill St. Arnaud was talking about the same issue in his Green IT/Broadband and Cyber-Infrastructure blog this week. In “NCAR’s new data center – an embarrassment to the climate community,” Bill explains that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and its managing organization, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) are building a new data center in Wyoming. I’ll let Bill tell you what the issue with this plan is:
“NCAR’s strategy to build a data center in Wyoming also highlights the ridiculousness and absurdity of claims to build an energy efficient data center with a low PUE in a LEED qualified building. These claims are meaningless when all of the electricity is coal generated. If NCAR was genuinely concerned about the environment a much smarter move would have been to locate the data center a few hundred kilometers west to Idaho where almost of the electricity is generated from hydro. Relocating to Idaho would do more for the environment than even the most stringent energy efficiency and LEED qualified buildings. It would also send an important message that new jobs and business opportunities are only going to occur in those jurisdictions that provide clean, renewable energy.”
Energy efficient design and other green approaches to lowering a datacenter’s carbon footprint are wonderful – but it is crucial to locate data centers in places with a stable source of reliable and clean, renewable energy.
Bill finishes up his article by saying that:
“I suspect NCAR is being seduced to locate its new data center in Wyoming because of the low price of electricity that comes from coal fired plants. But that strategy may backfire on them as Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power claims that their electricity prices will increase 73% with cap and trade.”
In my next entry, I will talk a bit more about cap and trade, and the ways that the carbon market (which is coming) will create financial incentives for businesses to choose datacenters that are located in the right place.
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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