Pulling the Plug: Summer of '08 Sparks Creative Conservation - WSJ.com

WSJ has an article on how people are being creative turning off their air conditioning. It is 2nd most popular article today behind the US bolsters fannie and freddie.

As the article cites, get ready for the electricity price increases.

Pulling the Plug: Summer of '08 Sparks Creative Conservation - WSJ.com

Because many power plants run on natural gas, which has shot way up in price, utilities in every region of the nation have imposed -- or are planning -- big rate increases this year, some approaching 30%.

In response, nearly two-thirds of families are cutting back on air conditioning, according to a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. They're buying ceiling fans and programmable thermostats; burning up hot afternoons in malls and movie theaters; and bombarding blogger Erin Huffstetler, who writes about frugal living, with questions about the merits of tinting their windows dark to block the sun.

I know the Microsoft guys say they save energy cleaning the roof.  Here is one guy who thinks he saves energy by sprinkling the roof.

On hot afternoons, Mr. Newman runs a hose to the roof and douses the shingles for 20 minutes, which he swears lowers the temperature inside. "I don't know if it's all that good for the life span of the roof," Mr. Newman says, "but when it's 110 degrees, I really could care less."

And WSJ even included a story of a bad move in air conditioning.

And Reba Kennedy, who turned off her central air altogether?

Ms. Kennedy now cools just the three rooms she uses most in her San Antonio home, with window units set at 78 degrees. To her surprise, she has found it pleasurable. With her downstairs windows open, she can smell the honeysuckle in her yard. She loves the look of her sheer curtains blowing in the breeze.

Last week, though, when she reviewed her electric bills, Ms. Kennedy found that her sacrifices haven't translated into savings. In June of 2006 -- with the central air on full blast -- she used an average of 26 kilowatt hours a day. Last month? An average of 44.

Harvey Sachs, a senior fellow at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, says that isn't surprising, because window units are notoriously inefficient.

But Ms. Kennedy was upset. Since quitting her job as a business lawyer two years ago to take up writing, she has tried to live simply and frugally; conserving energy is central to that goal.

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Are you crazy enough to succeed? - Behavior- msnbc.com, Possible explanation for Extreme Green Behaviors

Saw this MSNBC article and it provides a possible explanation for some people who are obsessed with Green practices that have no science backing their actions.

Are you crazy enough to succeed? - Behavior- msnbc.com

I'm at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorders Institute (OCDI), a residential treatment center in McLean Hospital — Harvard's psychiatric center — to see if my own OCD problem wasn't just my secret but maybe also the secret to my success. All my adult life, intrusive thoughts have alternately halted my progress and saved my ass, and I'd finally like to separate the bad from the good.

The medical director at the center, Michael Jenike, M.D., is both a maverick and a pioneer in the OCD community. He founded this facility, the first of its kind, to help sufferers of what he considers the most agonizing of psychiatric disorders.

"I had a 17-year-old who had kidney cancer that was going to kill him in 5 or 6 months. He also had a bad case of OCD. He said he'd rather get rid of his OCD and live only 6 months, than get rid of the cancer and live with the OCD. That's when it first hit me: This is some serious stuff."
The people seeking treatment at OCDI do not have the minstrel-show version of the disorder acted out by Tony Shalhoub in Monk or Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. The institute's residents are seriously impaired. They have the kind of shattering anxiety that would make the rest of the OCD world — roughly 1 percent of all adults, 2.3 million of them in the United States alone — want to scrub their hands. The real numbers could be even higher, because OCD may be underdiagnosed and undertreated. Half of all OCD cases are serious — and that's the highest percentage among all anxiety disorders. On average, people flail about for 17 years and see three or four doctors before they find the right care.
That horror aside, OCD has become cool. Perhaps it fascinates us because it forces otherwise normal people to carry out insane acts — acts that they know are insane. It has great dramatic tension. We secretly enjoy the dissonance of a perfectly rational man becoming convinced that he is fatally contaminated and washing his hands with bleach and a scrub brush, only to repeat the whole routine 10 minutes later. Paging Lady Macbeth.

For any you have started a green program in your company, I am sure you are familiar with people who could possibly be put in the category of having a Green Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

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A CIO Recommends Avoiding kW based Pricing. Why?

Duncan Scott, CIO at DTZ, a global real estate company is quoted in UK’s Computing web site to avoid kW based pricing in the short term.

“Datacentre providers have started to price by kilowatt and not by server footprint and performance, and those prices have gone up by 30 per cent in the past month,” said Duncan Scott, CIO at global commercial real estate management company DTZ Holdings.

“Inevitably we will have some kind of formula such as that used by the airlines that includes distress and passes the costs on.

“It is a bit of a stand-off at the moment. The question is what the price of oil is going to do next. Are the providers going to completely change their business model based on the oil price? My advice is avoid kilowatt pricing at the moment but accept that it is going to come eventually.”

The author of this article supports this idea that the shock of what the bills actually are would be a change IT cannot adapt to So delay the inevitable.

A $200-per-barrel oil price would be a jolt for IT, said David Tebbutt, programme director at analyst Freeform Dynamics. “This may wake people up to the true cost of IT, and move the cost of electricity from facilities budgets to IT,” he said.

“The cost of IT infrastructure would go shooting up. But you are not going to solve the problem quickly. You can get staff to behave differently and economise on power, but you can’t transform IT infrastructure at a stroke. It can take years.”

This is a new take on what to do about high power costs.  Don’t tell people, because if they saw the bill, they wouldn’t be able to adapt quickly.  Sounds like internal politics to not put a group on the spot as to what they will do to save energy.

As crazy as this sounds, maybe people do want to hide the energy bill, and avoid the problem. Sounds logical for an IT group that is understaffed, budget limited, and has no idea on what to do to make a green data center and green IT services.

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Microsoft Employee, Blogs a Response to NYTimes article on Climate-Change Ranking

The Green PR wars are escalating and the latest report from Climate Counts is covered by the NYTimes.

Craig Berman, a spokesman for Amazon.com — which scored 5 this year, up from zero in 2007 — also shrugged off the scores. He noted that Amazon had made “significant progress” in reducing packaging and otherwise reducing its carbon footprint.

Companies that showed marked improvement were far more exuberant. Google, which has pledged to become carbon neutral, rose by 38 points, to 55. “Projects that had been years in the making came to fruition,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar.

The NYTimes article makes no mention of Yahoo or Microsoft.  This interesting that Google gets better scores than Yahoo, even though Yahoo has achieved carbon neutrality for 2007 by buying carbon credits.  Yahoo scores 37.  The Yahoo green staff have got to be pissed.

Microsoft employee, Lewis Curtis, blogs a response to the NYtimes article.

Today, in the New York Times, the Climate Counts group gave an impressive rating to Google 55 while rating Microsoft at a 38.   They quoted Google's commitment to go carbon neutral.   

Google is a heavy user for energy and all of their green token projects have been tiny.  I predict they have spent more money marketing their green projects than the actual projects themselves.

Also, if they have a commitment to be carbon neutral, why don't they release their real carbon footprint numbers?  in the spirit of openness and "do no evil", why don't they disclose the real progress or allow the public to tour their centers to see the real work being done to improve environmental impact?

Apple was given a very low rating of 11.   I think it's comical in the interview with the New York Times, Apple blamed much of their carbon footprint on their users. 

So let talk about Microsoft:

Microsoft is one of the only massive web solutions companies that allows customers to tour their datacenters to see the real  environmental improvements to increase efficiency and decrease environmental impact.

From presentations from Microsoft's datacenter team to the public, it's explained how we measure and how granular we measure and what specific steps Microsoft takes.   I've worked for many large tech giants and at this point, I haven't seen a more open model to the public. 

also:

Microsoft as developed the most aggressive power saving features in the world for client and server computers.  There are significant power savings capabilities for consumers and administrators to control to reduce energy consumption of their operating system experience.

Microsoft's .Net platform has capabilities for developers to write power aware applications in WPF (windows presentation foundation) to reduce power drain on client systems.

In the last couple of years,(many would be surprised) Microsoft now offers some of the most consolidation infrastructure options to reduce the number of servers and clients in an IT organization.

Microsoft invests significant amounts of money into the Microsoft Research group to design solutions for consumers and corporations reduce environmental impact. 

Microsoft offers some of the most pervasive remote worker solutions in the world.

Microsoft has invested significantly in websites, concerts and public campaigns to  help consumers learn how to reduce environmental impact (much of it not relating to our product line).

In reality, it's easy to see how critics can pick apart organizations through their narrow lens.  I predict that we will see more of these models in the future.   But, I hope the environmental sustainability market matures to a better state than this.

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Microsoft's Mike Manos Opening Keynote Uptime Institute, Green Enterprise Computing

The opening of the Uptime Institute Symposium started with Pitt Turner, saying "what are we doing here?" Green Enterprise Computing is a timely topic for the industry event. I've seen Mike present before, and here is what I got out of Mike's latest presentation as new information to digest.

  1. Mike's call to action for all was to stop being information hogs, and to share with the industry. He gave numerous example, and here are a few Mike shared.
  2. Mike emphasized that in spite of a focus on technology. Microsoft has found having the right people and processes makes bigger impact than technology . Mike states over 50% of data center outages are caused by human error. This contrasts a common method to invest in multiple layers of infrastructure redundancy to achieve uptime.Mike was proud of Microsoft's ability to have a 100% facilities uptime over 7 years by implementing strong and disciplined maintenance programs. Also, redundant infrastructure creates more energy waste.
  3. Technology is not the only answer to energy efficiency. People are the opportunity. Microsoft achieved a PUE improvement from 2.2 to 1.8 with no new technology just by people making changes to existing systems in one of their older facilities.
  4. Mike didn't say this, but bottom line he emphasizes an Amazon.com approach in getting data on everything, and they'll figure out what to do with it after by giving people the information to do the right thing.

It is amazing thing  to see how Microsoft has risen from nowhere a year ago to be the leader in the Green Enterprise Computing with Mike Manos, delivering the opening keynote.

I'll keep blogging more, but I should socialize for now.

For good notes on what Mike presented previously at AFCOM Data Center World go to John Rath's Blog post.

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