During the Copenhagen Climate Summit, carbon offsets are a topic for discussion. Carbon offests are “essentially a service whereby the purchaser pays someone else to create greenhouse gas reductions on his or her behalf” (The Suzuki Foundation). Since the inception of the Kyoto Protocol, they have been a popular mechanism to encourage awareness about climate change, and to reduce carbon emissions. However, according the US News “officials [at Copenhagen] will be considering which types of offset programs work and can actually be enforced,” because “there's a big potential for fraud here.” To date, there is no formal regulation of carbon offsets, and there are a number of concerns with their use.

Groups that promote action on climate change have long argued that carbon offsets can “promot[e] innovation, help[] to make clean energy projects more economically viable, and allow[] people to take responsibility for their entire carbon footprint, including emissions that can't be effectively reduced.” However, these same organizations make it VERY clear that “offsets are not a replacement for direct action by individuals, businesses or organizations to reduce their own carbon footprints” (Suzuki Foundation). Carbon offsets are only a solution after businesses and individuals have made as many changes as possible to reduce their carbon footprints.

Unfortunately, experience has shown that carbon offsets don’t actually encourage behavior changes. In fact, carbon offsets are beginning to be seen as a way for people and businesses to “assuage their guilt” by buying a “get out of jail free card.”

Yet many Web Hosting companies and data centers are building “green” marketing campaigns based on the fact that they are purchasing carbon offsets, without providing any evidence that they have actually made efforts to reduce the carbon they produce. This is, in my opinion, greenwashing, and makes it hard for businesses to find truly green hosting solutions.

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.

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.

Green ICT is a topic I am passionate about. In my experience, when it comes to climate change, everyone is talking about solutions that will take years to have a real impact. But just by changing our thinking, by embracing virtual technologies over physical ones, and by moving our data to efficient datacenters in the right locations,  we can mitigate a serious source of greenhouse gas emissions, and do so right now. We can make ICT more sustainable, more green, both inside and outside the datacenter. I see a real solution, and I look forward to working with industry colleagues to help make this change. As I share ideas in this blog, I invite you to offer suggestions for how we can get people to act on this message.

Green ICT

Information Communication Technology (ICT) is one of the fastest growing sources of CO2 emissions today. According to the International Science Grid, ICT is "the fifth largest consumer of power in the world, currently contributes 3-4% of the world’s CO2 emissions—and is doubling every three to four years." The ICT industry is a major polluter, and its carbon footprint is multiplying at an incredible rate. We need to take action as an industry.

Many conversations about green ICT revolve around the end user and what they can do. This is all solid advice. Conscious end-user choices -- like turning off computers, TVs, wireless routers etc when they are not in use – will make a difference.

However, datacenters (and corporate IT infrastructure) are routinely recognized as major contributors to ICT’s carbon footprint.  By changing where we locate datacenters, and by making smart design choices, we can reduce our carbon footprint by up to 50 times (when compared to  the footprint of traditional datacenters).

Datacenter Location and Design

Datacenters require a lot of power to operate. In North America 50% or more of this power comes from coal fired generating plants, which are one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions. Simply locating datacenters near low-carbon power sources (biomass, hydroelectric, geothermal) substantially reduces the carbon footprint of these datacenters.

Locating datacenters in cooler climates can also reduce their CO2 emissions, because much of the power used in datacenters is used to cool the servers and other equipment. New technology takes advantage of cool outside temperatures to regulate the temperature inside datacenters. In addition, design choices like cold aisle containment and modular construction can seriously reduce the power the datacenter uses. Finally, technologies like virtualization, unified fabric network, and cloud computing improve IT efficiency inside the datacenter.

In future blog entries, I plan to explore these approaches to reducing CO2 emissions. I will also discuss the economic incentives that support a green and sustainable ICT, and I will consider the opportunities and challenges that come with pursuing this goal. I will also look at the different ways we can measure and monitor our carbon footprint, the different green IT standards and so on. There is, obviously, a lot to talk about and a lot that we can do!