Going Green Makes “Cents”

Going green as a company is the right thing to do, whether for; reasons of caring about the environment; fiduciary responsibility in light of government regulations; for pure marketing reasons, or for any other reason it is still the right thing to do. The problem is how do you go about it?

As you begin formulating a corporate green strategy you will soon realize that a major contributor to your corporate greenhouse gas footprint is your ICT (information Communication Technology) infrastructure. You see that every year your use of ICT grows, in some cases exponentially. How you tackle reducing that carbon footprint will make a huge difference in how green your company is, how much money you save (both now and when carbon taxes/offsets come into play) and just as important, how green your company is seen to be by your customers and the general public. As you dig further you will discover that worldwide ICT accounts for 2%nearly a quarter of it (Gartner Group) comes from datacenters. That’s .5% of all GHG emissions on the planet are coming from one source – datacenters. That percentage is growing exponentially as more and more people become connected to an ICT infrastructure (think of the change in China where 8 years ago only 59M used the Internet and today it’s 384M (Reuters) and all that data needs to be stored in datacenters. (Gartner Group) of GHG emissions and of that 2%,

If you are looking to reduce your corporate carbon footprint you need to look closely at the carbon footprint of the datacenter you currently use, be it your own in-house, or a commercial one. Not all datacenters are created equal. While there are many factors that determine how “clean” or “dirty” a datacenter is the single biggest factor is its source of power. If your datacenter is in a state or province that generates its energy from coal you are at a 5000% disadvantage over someone whose datacenter uses hydro-electric power. Let’s look at two examples of this, West Virginia which is 100% coal powered and British Columbia which is nearly 100% Hydro powered. Due to the size of the original spreadsheet I have had to remove some columns to make it fit but the gist remains.

*PUE is Power Usage Effectiveness – a ratio of the amount of power in total the datacenter uses to the amount needed to run ICT equipment. The closer to 1 the more efficient the datacenter is.. Most commercial datacenters today are in the 2.5 to 3 range which means they need 2.5 to 3 watts incoming power to operate 1 watt of ICT equipment, very inefficient.

In the table above you can see that in BC the equivalent of 17 grams of CO₂ are created for every Kilowatt hour of power generated. In West Virginia it is 1055, that’s 62 times as much! With carbon at $20 per metric ton that makes a huge difference, a $7,274,494.00/yr difference in operating costs for a 40MW datacenter and you can bet that will be passed along to its customers in higher power rates or higher square foot rates. One way or other customers will make up that shortfall while at the same time doing nothing to lower their own carbon footprint. So, how do you solve this problem?

With today’s high speed fiber networks and new lossless Ethernet technologies, the answer is simple; distance truly is irrelevant when you have good network in place so find a datacenter that has a better footprint. Find one powered by hydro-electric only, with a low PUE and a focus on being as green as they can be. I say powered by hydro because to date solar and wind power is not suitable for datacenter due to the varying amounts of power that they produce throughout the day and night. Datacenters need steady, uninterrupted power which those renewable sources cannot at this time provide (more on how they can fit in coming in a future post). Look for a provider that is not only uses green power but is actively seeking ways to produce carbon credits you can use. A double win as it were; lower your overall costs and get salable credits at the same time. Put your ICT infrastructure where it will do you the greenest good.

Beware of the companies that say they buy carbon offsets to cover up for their dirty power as not only is the carbon offset industry ripe with fraudulent operators but there is also a great deal of misleading claims. As an example, REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) schemes where people are paid to not cut down trees are not the same as schemes where trees are planted. REDD does not lower the amount of GG in the atmosphere, it is maintaining the status quo, which we have already determined needs lowering, but they are marketed as such. Even if the offset project is not a fraud there is still the problem that all you are doing is maintaining status quo – if your ITC use creates 200mT of carbon a year you buy 200mT of offsets to cover it. That is the status quo, not green, and this is the single biggest problem with typical offsets, they do nothing to lower atmospheric concentrations of GHCs.