IBM’s Green Data Center has been covered by numerous news & blogs, and I didn’t have anything to add until I ran into this article, regarding IBM’s presence in Tulsa, OK and their tax rebates there.

Across the nation, IBM leaves a trail of broken promises

Big Blue takes public benefits, but cuts jobs, underdelivers

By Christine Young

Times Herald-Record

July 27, 2008

It was December 2004, and Tulsa, Okla., was abuzz with excitement.

IBM, which already employed more than 1,200 in Tulsa, had made a deal with the state to add another 1,000 jobs by 2009. In return, Big Blue would get $35.2 million in rebates over 10 years.

Calling it “great news for Tulsa and for all of Oklahoma,” Gov. Brad Henry praised IBM as “a vital and valuable corporate citizen.” He said the deal “signifies good things for both IBM and Tulsa.”

He was only half right.

Since the 2004 agreement, the Oklahoma Tax Commission has sent Big Blue more than $4.4 million in rebates. Yet state figures show the company’s job count is the same today as it was before the deal was signed.

This raises questions for New York, where the ink is still drying on an agreement with IBM that will cost taxpayers $140 million in exchange for promises of jobs and economic development.

So, what happened in Boulder, CO and IBM’s Green Data Center.

In Boulder, Colo., where IBM employs about 3,000, the city doled out a $100,000 tax rebate on top of state incentives worth $632,000 for a “green” data center that opened last month but created no new jobs.

“The city’s money was really an indication to IBM corporate that Boulder really cares about having this company here,” Frances Draper of the Boulder Economic Council told reporters. “That was an incredibly important part of their decision.”

This year IBM has slashed 400 jobs in Boulder.

I wonder if the person who doled out the tax rebates even knows IBM slashed 400 jobs in Boulder.

The author continues on how much people fear IBM.

The dirty secret is that no one wants to take on IBM for fear of losing jobs and hurting the local economy, especially in areas such as Dutchess County, where Big Blue is such a vital player.

“Nobody wants to throw the baby out with the bath water,” said Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner.

And so New York went ahead with a pact with IBM, requiring a hefty donation from taxpayers, and announcing it one day before the company’s second-quarter profit jumped a dizzying 22 percent to $2.77 billion, defying even Wall Street’s expectations.

The agreement with the Westchester-based technology giant, announced by Gov. David Paterson on July 15, calls for a $1.5 billion investment by IBM and $140 million by the state.

It includes $75 million from taxpayers for 1,000 new jobs – 325 at Albany Nanotech, and another 675 at an upstate facility that has yet to be named.

The remaining $65 million will help finance the expansion and upgrade of IBM’s East Fishkill plant, in return for IBM’s pledge to retain 1,400 semiconductor jobs at the Dutchess County site.

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.

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.

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?

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.