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.

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.

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.

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.

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.