Green Data Center Blog

Australia’s Carbon Trading Initiative – Impact on Data Centre?

Australia’s gov’t is promoting a Carbon Trading Scheme.

One of the interesting outcomes will how it effects data centres given their energy consumption.

We don't know yet what the impact will be on those same working families who ditched John Howard for Rudd, nor the effect carbon trading will have on potential investments in steel, aluminium, cement, oil, gas, petroleum and other emissions-intensive industries.

The Australia gov’t document is here http://www.environment.gov.au/minister/wong/2008/pubs/mr20080716.pdf.

An Environmental Lesson from the Airline Industry

News.com has an article “The Wild Green Yonder”, substituting Green for what was Blue.

Some points we should learn from for a Green Data Center.

Sustainability is the new buzzword at Farnborough this year, and it is echoing as loud as the planes screaming by overhead.

"It's a matter for survival," Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said at an environmental conference Wednesday.

With global air traffic expected to swell in coming years, government regulators, including the European Commission, are applying pressure to make planes quieter, cleaner and more efficient, and threatening penalties if they fall short.

"Our customers are under hellish pressures to come up with improvements," said Tom Williams, an Airbus executive vice president.

There are no cheap or easy solutions. Lighter materials, new fuels and other innovations that promise to make planes more environmentally friendly mean more expense and development time. That includes the billions that engine makers are spending to develop new products.

All that could make it hard for the manufacturers to offer the discounts that their big customers have come to expect, potentially wiping out the savings that such planes might offer.

"It's a bitter split," said Williams of Airbus.

Bisignani said the industry was late to realize it needed to do more to stress its environmental credentials, leaving it open for attacks from environmental groups and threats of new taxes from Europe and elsewhere.

This same problem can hit Data Centers when environmental groups and gov’t start thinking data centers should be taxed and regulated.

Some people deny the problem and until recently.

Some executives here said the criticisms were unfounded. "Aviation should not be treated as a pariah," Tony Tyler, chief executive of Cathay Pacific, said at the environmental conference. "Everybody understands our obligations. Everyone is taking it very seriously."

The new focus this year is in sharp contrast to the Farnborough show in 2006, when Boeing's technology experts insisted in staff meetings that it was impossible to develop fuels that could substitute for the kerosene that powers jets.

Now, Boeing is conducting tests with four airlines--Virgin Atlantic, Japan Air Lines, Air New Zealand, and Continental--to see what may work best as an alternative fuel. British Airways, meanwhile, has invited energy producers to bring it fuels that it will test in laboratory conditions, its chief executive, Willie Walsh, said here.

Much of what is discussed can be used to describe the mindset of IT professionals, but hopefully the data center industry will not make the mistakes the airline industry has.  Even Blue IBM has changing its image to be Green.

Greenest Show on Earth: Democrats Tackle Politically Correct Convention

Front Page WSJ points out the challenge of hosting a 50,000 political spectacular Democratic party event that is politically correct.  Can they host a Green event and succeed without being attacked for their practices?  We will see.

The Greenest Show on Earth:
Democrats Gear Up for Denver

From Organic Fanny Packs to 'Pure' Trash,
Party Planners Face Logistical Nightmare

By STEPHANIE SIMON
June 25, 2008; Page A1

DENVER -- As the Mile High City gears up to host a Democratic bash for 50,000, organizers are discovering the perils of trying to stage a political spectacle that's also politically correct.

Consider the fanny packs.

With biodegradable balloons and organic snacks, Denver Democrats hope to stage the "greenest convention" ever. See examples.

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: "That just doesn't exist."

Ditto for the baseball caps. "We have a union cap or an organic cap," Mr. DeMasse says. "But we don't have a union-organic offering."

Much of the hand-wringing can be blamed on Denver's Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, who challenged his party and his city to "make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet."

Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. Her response to the mayor's challenge: "That terrifies me!"

At first I felt sorry for the environmental activist Andrea Robinson, and decided to look up her background as an activist.  I found her acting list  http://www.us.imdb.com/name/nm0732365/ with appearances on CSI Miami, Joey, Doc, West Wing, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, ( there are 24 entries)

Then I went to the Democratic Committee web site. http://www.demconvention.com/meet-the-green-team/.

Meet the Green Team

Andrea Robinson
Director, Sustainability & Greening

Andrea is the first person to ever hold the position of “Director of Greening” for the DNCC and began creating the sustainability plan in September 2007.  She is responsible for constructing, developing, and managing the sustainability and greening efforts for the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Andrea works with all DNCC Convention venues, departments, construction and production teams to adopt and implement environmentally responsible practices in all aspects of the convention planning and restoration phases. She serves as the Co-Chair of the Denver Mayors Energy Task Force and Denver Mayors Waste Minimization Task Force and works closely with the City of Denver and DNCC venues to create a long-term legacy of sustainability in Denver before, during and after the Convention.

With more than 25 years in the environmental field, Ms. Robinson has a long history of greening large scale events, developing corporate sustainability practices, championing renewable energy, endangered species & habitat protection issues for political campaigns and creating waste diversion and reduction programs. Most recently, Robinson managed the greening of the New York, Shanghai and Johannesburg venues for Vice President Al Gore's Live Earth Concerts for the Climate Crisis, the largest musical event in world history. At Live Earth, she also single-handedly built and managed relationships with over 650 international non-profit, intergovernmental and civil society organizations focused on solving the climate crisis. She has worked extensively with a variety of environmental non-profit organizations, including the Sierra Club and Environment Colorado.  Ms. Robinson received her degree in Environmental Science from University of California at Santa Barbara with an honors thesis on Biodiversity and the United Nations Earth Summit.

I don’t see how she has 25 years of experience given she started acting in 1995 on Baywatch Nights.  But, hey this must be part of being an actress.  She started her environmental work when she was 12. She did work for Al Gore, and he did invent the Internet. :-)

She does have some learning on how long it takes for a product to biodegrade. Was she paying attention to her science courses as part of her environmental studies degree?

To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Ms. Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap.

…

But remember those balloons? She checked the compost heap last week -- and found them still intact. She has added more liquid to try to get them to degrade.

And if they don't? "The balloons will be there," she promises.

The convention's greening gurus say they're doing the best they can with the most current information available.

Can you claim lack of information as an excuse?

California's Resource Colonialism, Keeping the Good in the state, and Pushing the Bad out

WSJ.com has an opinion article by Max Schulz which does a good job of summarizing the California Energy Policy.  This article reminds me of those people who pursue a Green strategy to look good versus an effective Green solution.

Max starts with the good.

"When you look at the globe, California is a little spot on that globe," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently at Yale University's Climate Change Conference. "But when it comes to our power of influence, it is the equivalent of a whole continent."

Perhaps. As an exercise of this influence, Mr. Schwarzenegger has attempted to push climate-change policy forward, signing the Global Warming Solutions Act. It commits the state to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels – roughly 25% below today's – and all but eliminating them by 2050.

"California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta," he said in his state of the state address last year. "Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there."

His words are in keeping with the state's self-perception. Politicians, business titans, academics and environmental activists proudly point to four decades of environmentally conscious public policy – while maintaining a dynamic economy, arguably the eighth-largest on the planet, with a gross state product of more than $1.6 trillion.

And, then starts to set the reality of the situation.

In truth, the state's energy leadership is a mirage. Decades of environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated crippling costs; and left the state vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies.

The blunt secret is this: California now imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for having too few power plants. Up to 20% of the state's power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Montana. Another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas.

"California practices a sort of energy colonialism," says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.-area investment group. "They leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution."

California's proud claim to have kept per-capita energy consumption flat while growing its economy is less impressive than it seems. The state has some of the highest energy prices in the country – nearly twice the national average – largely because of regulations and government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have been fleeing the Golden State in droves.

And closes with

Californians may feel good about their environmental consciousness. But someone needs to build power plants and oil refineries to fuel their economy. Someone needs to manufacture the cars they drive, the airplanes they fly, the chemicals and resins and paints and plastics that make their lives comfortable.

Corbis

The Rancho Seco nuclear power plant could generate 900 megwatts of electricity. It was shut down and converted to solar power, and today generates four megawatts.

Companies can pursue this same California Colonialism strategy by outsourcing their data center operations and getting the energy consumption off of their books. I wouldn't be surprised if the outsourcing companies like EDS, IBM, and HP have figured out a way to leverage this into their presentations.

Is it Possible Future Government Regulation - Environmental Impact Records

Sitting in the bar last night at the Swan Hotel, the location of the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2008, I met Buck on vacation with his family from St. Louis. It turns out Buck works for Emerson Electric in procurement for electrical components, and it was a fun chat about the industry and the perspective he has sourcing around the world.  He gets an interesting economic view of things when he interacts with markets for copper, plastics, and all the components to build things data centers need to run.

One of the interesting things he mentioned is new regulations have started and are gaining more momentum, requiring companies keep records of complete chemical composition for all components used in their manufacturing process.

With possible eWaste issues for data centers on the horizon, is it possible that data centers would need environmental impacts records from their suppliers? And, then required to pass that information on as part of end life?

You may laugh, but 20 years ago when working on power supplies with Aztec, now owned by Emerson Electric, we would have never thought you would need complete records of chemical composition for a power supply.

Given large data centers are huge resource consumers run by some of the richest organizations in the world, it is easy for government regulators to create new regulations thinking data center operators can afford the costs to support an environmental impact record.

Environmental Executive Leadership - The Green Pope

Newsweek has an article about the Pope and Vatican City, being Carbon Neutral. We can assume this means the Vatican's data center is carbon neutral.

ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP

The Green Pope

Benedict XVI has embraced environmentalism. How he's using church teachings to urge Roman Catholics to take care of the earth.

Vincenzo Pinto / AFP-Getty Images

The pope believes that eco-friendly lifestyles will help protect the world's poorest communities

It may be known for sending out iconic smoke signals when a new pope is elected, but the Vatican is actually the world's only sovereign state that can lay claim to being carbon-neutral. That means that all greenhouse gas emissions from the Holy See are offset through renewable energies and carbon credits. Last summer the city-state's ancient buildings were outfitted with solar panels intended to be a key source of electricity, and an eco-restoration firm donated enough trees in a Hungarian national park to nullify all carbon emitted from Vatican City, which takes up one-fifth of a square mile.

Both moves were embraced by Pope Benedict XVI, who not only oversees the global church, he serves as the chief administrator of the operation of the Vatican. And in both religious and secular circles Benedict has earned the title of "green pope." In addition to boosting efforts to make Vatican City more environmentally efficient, he also uses Roman Catholic doctrine to emphasize humanity's responsibility to care for the planet.

What is being the Pope going Green?  Here is the bottom line:

"When you have an issue getting so much attention, there are a lot of voices talking about it. Benedict knows that and he wanted a seat at the table," says Lucia Silecchia, a social law professor at Catholic University who published a paper last year titled "Discerning the Environmental Perspective of Pope Benedict XVI." "He saw this as a way to push the values of the church in a new context."

BusinessWeek has an old write up on the Vatican.  This matches what Cory Low told me as he was one of the volunteers at the Vatican web site.

MAY 8, 2006

GLOBAL BUSINESS
O Click All Ye Faithful
The nun who launched the Vatican's Web site is at work on a MySpace for Catholics
Deep inside the Vatican, a white-haired nun dressed in a brown habit opens the door to a room full of computers. The whirring machines hold some of the mysteries of the Holy See, including photographs of the Vatican Secret Archives and of ancient illustrated manuscripts. No, this isn't a movie trailer for The Da Vinci Code. Our guide is Sister Judith Zoebelein, the editorial director of the Internet Office of the Holy See. She's showing off a small but potent Vatican data center, which bristles with servers and other high-tech gear.

It's no secret that the Vatican has a fantastic Web site. It brims with fine art and practical information about the Catholic Church. The site, www.vatican.va, which comes in six languages, was even nominated for a prestigious Webby Award a few years back. But little is known about the woman who is behind it. Sister Judith, a 57-year-old American, grew up in a middle-class household in the Hamptons on the eastern tip of Long Island. She and a handful of colleagues were Internet pioneers when, in 1995, they launched the Vatican Web site. Since then, she has greatly expanded the site, including images of art from the Vatican Museums, a powerful search engine, and videos of restoration projects.

Carbon Credits vs. Energy Efficiency

I just listened to Uptime Institute's interview with Yahoo's Director of Climate and Energy Strategy at Yahoo.

According to Page, to help control the rising energy consumption of the data center Industry, carbon footprint benchmarking should become an industry norm in the next 12 to 24 months.  “I think it’s especially important because it looks like we’re going to have regulation around greenhouse gases in this country in the next several years,” said Ms. Page.

And this reminded me people are questioning the Carbon Credit market. WSJ post on Carbon Credits: UN raises questions.

Carbon Credits: U.N. Raises Questions

Posted by Jeffrey Ball

Is the booming global trade in carbon credits doing anything to curb global warming?

That’s the question we keep hearing in response to two recent stories we wrote in the Journal about the carbon market’s growing pains. How policymakers and the public answer it will say a lot about whether society is likely to muster the massive effort that would be necessary to really slash global-warming emissions.

Carbon-police headquarters. (Associated Press)

One story, on Saturday, explained how the United Nations, which oversees the growing trade in carbon credits from the developing world, is cracking down – largely because of concerns that environmentally questionable projects are getting through the system. At issue: Whether some of the projects would have happened even without the revenue from the sale of carbon credits, in which case that money would be going to waste. It’s a hot question, even in the U.S., where a small voluntary-carbon-credit market has sprung up.

Companies putting together those credits say the problem is different: They say the U.N. is changing the market’s rules midstream, raising the bigger threat that the market will stay small. Our story today focused on one of them: EcoSecurities Ltd. Its shares have fallen by nearly 70% since last fall, when it announced it was writing off a quarter of the carbon credits it had promised the market. A main factor in that write-off: the U.N. crackdown, which is slowing the market.

The carbon market so far has done little to curb emissions. Backers say its promise is as a first step. At issue in the debate over the legitimacy of carbon credits is whether the whole concept of using markets attack greenhouse-gas emissions will get a “black mark” in the eyes of politicians and the public, says William Pizer, a senior fellow focusing on climate policy at Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank. “If it turns out to be a failed model, it’s a question of how many more tries we would get,” he says. “There is a risk that there just becomes general skepticism” about the world’s ability to address global warming.

And to give a different opinion on this Market matters: High Energy Prices Reshape Climate Debate.

Market Matters: High Energy Prices Reshape Climate Debate

Posted by Keith Johnson

If the peak-oil crowd is right, and oil prices are stuck in triple digits regardless of what the dollar does or where commodities investments go, what does that mean for the shift to a new-energy landscape? Mark this: High energy prices could prove the most important factor in the debate over what kind of international system will replace the Kyoto Protocol when its caps expire in 2012.

Kyoto sought to wean the world off its fossil-fuel energy base at a time when fossil fuels were cheap. But high energy prices change things, says economist Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile and a United Nations special envoy on climate change. “It is all an economic argument,” Mr. Lagos told us. “Yesterday, what wasn’t economically viable is viable today. But that’s true if and only if” oil stays expensive.

Ricardo Lagos says high energy prices change things. (Associated Press)

Higher energy prices make energy-efficiency a more-appealing option for many industries in many countries, he said, and that’s the cheapest and quickest way to get countries with very different political agendas moving in the same direction to cut emissions. Efficiency, forest protection, and a sector-by-sector approach are his preferred ingredients for the next big climate agreement.

The quest for Kyoto’s replacement has been dogged by rich countries balking at costs of curbing emissions while developing countries plow ahead with energy-intensive growth. But high energy costs can push industry even quicker than legislation can: Witness the scramble for fuel-efficiency improvements in aviation or cement manufacture, for instance.

The WSJ also ran an article about two carbon-market millionaires take a hit as UN clamps down.

UP IN SMOKE
Two Carbon-Market Millionaires
Take a Hit as U.N. Clamps Down

EcoSecurities Sees
Shares Slide 70%;
'In the Gray Zone'

By JEFFREY BALL
April 14, 2008; Page A1

OXFORD, England -- Marc Stuart and Pedro Moura Costa have become multimillionaires in a booming new market designed to fight global warming.

Now, their empire is under attack.

Their firm, United Kingdom-based EcoSecurities Ltd., helps companies in the industrialized world meet their obligations to pollute less by selling them "credits" that fund clean-air projects in poorer nations. Last year, some $9.4 billion in these credits were traded, up from almost none four years earlier.

The market's anything-goes early days now appear to be ending. United Nations officials who regulate the trade have started questioning scores of proposed projects, from hydroelectric plants in China to wind farms in India. The issue: whether they provide real environmental gains, or are just padding the pockets of middlemen like EcoSecurities.

EcoSecurities' woes are a prime example of how tough it is proving to be to launch a coordinated world-wide attack on global warming. The carbon-credit industry's growing pains come just as Congress is considering similar pollution-cutting rules targeting U.S. industries.

EcoSecurities is one of the main players in an international market that was created as part of the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming. A key premise of the system is that, because greenhouse gases damage the atmosphere no matter where they originate, society should attack them first where the cleanup is cheapest, in the developing world. But policing that far-flung market has proved to be tricky because it involves valuing a commodity, climate-warming emissions of gas, that is far less tangible than oil or gold.

What is the right Carbon Credit strategy?  It's not clear.

Pendulum Swings the Other Way, Europe to Back Clean Coal

WSJ reports in an article Europe rethinks Clean Coal.

Then Again, Maybe We Will: Europe to Back Clean Coal?

Posted by Keith Johnson

A coal plant in Germany. (Associated Press)

When it comes to finding new energy sources, apparently you can never say never.

As recently as February, the European Union said there was “no possibility” of funding clean-coal technology, and left the ball in the court of private power companies, just as the U.S. government did when it pulled the plug on the FutureGen clean coal project.

Not so fast. The EU is now scrambling to fast-track funding for a dozen demonstration power plants that could capture and store emissions of carbon dioxide starting around 2015. Reuters reports:

The European Union may boost efforts to capture climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and store it underground by pushing forward proposals for a dozen demonstration projects, EU officials said on Thursday […]A European Commission source said CCS could be detached from a package of energy reforms announced in January with the aim of reaching a political agreement in time for a meeting of EU ministers in June.

President Bush, in his Rose Garden climate speech Wednesday, called for more technology investment to tackle the nation’s energy challenge. But his administration also cancelled the nation’s big clean-coal project earlier this year on cost grounds. Little wonder, given how immature today’s technology is: The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that capturing CO2 from coal plants costs about $150 per ton. That’s almost as much as the stuff costs in the first place. And it could take decades to make carbon capture and storage commercially viable, according to the DOE and many utilities.

Wales Minister for Economy and Transport equates Data Centres to motorways of 21st Century, promotes £200 million investment in technically advanced green data centre

publictechnology.net has an article covering the announcement made by Ieuan Wyn Jones, Wales Minister for Economy and Transport.

Next Generation Data is to invest up to £200million in Wales to create one of Europe’s largest and most technically advanced ‘green’ data-centres.

The announcement was made by Ieuan Wyn Jones, Minister for the Economy and Transport, who described it as a strategically important investment that would bring long term benefits to Wales and the Welsh economy.

The NGD Europe 1 data-centre will be based in the former Hynix semiconductor plant in Newport – a circa 70,000 sq mt facility owned by the Welsh Assembly Government. It will be located near an electricity sub-station which will ensure that the facility has adequate power for the foreseeable future.

And emphasizes the future development due to the data center arriving.

The Minister described the investment as being a critically important addition to the IT and telecoms infrastructure in Wales.

“A data-centre of this size and capacity will not only support Welsh businesses to remain competitive in a global economy but also has the capacity to act as a catalyst in attracting new business.

“The new centre will be of particular interest to our growing financial services sector, offering business continuity while also providing our SMEs with cost effective access to high quality, robust and secure data-centre services.”

The First Minister Rhodri Morgan said the Assembly Government had been actively targeting the data-centre development market and promoting the Newport facility as part of its strategy to attract investment from this sector.

"Data Centres are the motorways of the 21st Century. They encourage economic development in the same way that motorways did in the 20th Century and the railways in the 19th Century. They are an absolutely critical tool for economic growth, and that's why I am so pleased that we have secured this development.

ISO Launches Standard for Energy Management

ISO has launched a project committee to develop an international standard for energy management following their successful examples of ISO 9000 and 14000 series.

ISO has just approved the creation of a project committee mandated to develop an international standard on energy management.

The standard will provide all types of organizations and companies a practical and widely recognized approach to increase energy efficiency, reduce costs and improve their environmental performance by addressing both the technical and management aspects of rational energy use. The standard is intended to be broadly applicable to various sectors of national economies, including utility, manufacturing, commercial building, general commerce, and transportation sectors, and therefore, could have influence on as much as 60 % of the world’s energy demand.

ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden commented: “The urgency to reduce GHG emissions, the reality of higher prices from reduced availability of fossil fuels, and the need to promote energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources, provide a strong rationale for developing this new standard building on the most advanced best practices and existing national or regional standards”.

Following the successful examples of the ISO 9000 series on quality management and the ISO 14000 series on environmental management, the project committee ISO/PC 242, Energy management, will consider the development of a standard containing relevant terms and definitions and providing management system requirements together with guidance for use, implementation, measurement and metrics.

The intent of the new ISO/PC 242 series are:

• provide organizations and companies (utilities, manufacturers, commerce, buildings, transportation, both private and public) with a well-recognized framework for integrating energy efficiency into their management practices
• offer organizations with operations in more than one country a single, harmonized standard for implementation across the organization
• provide a logical and consistent methodology for identifying and implementing improvements that may contribute to a continual increase in energy efficiency across facilities
• assist organizations to better utilize existing energy consuming assets, thus reducing costs and/or expanding capacity
• offer guidance on benchmarking, measuring, documenting, and reporting energy intensity improvements and their projected impact on reductions in GHG emissions
• create transparency and facilitate communication on the management of energy, promote energy management best practices, thus reinforcing the value of good energy management behaviours
• assist facilities in evaluating and prioritizing the implementation of new energy-efficient technologies
• provide a framework for organizations to encourage suppliers to better manage their energy, thus promoting energy efficiency throughout the supply chain
• facilitate the use of energy management as a component of GHG emission reduction projects.

The secretariat of ISO/PC 242 will be held jointly by the ISO members for the United States and for Brazil: ANSI (American National Standardization Institute) and ABNT (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas).