Green IT/Broadband and Cyber-infrastructure Overview

One of the greatest threats to our future society and economy is global warming. It is estimated that the CO2 emissions of the ICT industry alone exceeds the carbon output of the entire aviation industry. The ICT industry and research community has a collective responsibility to help address this problem. Fortunately, as compared to the aviation industry, the ICT industry and research community has the tools at hand to reduce its direct CO2 output to zero and the additional capability of enabling other sectors of society to reduce their carbon footprint through "Carbon rewards" rather than unpopular "Carbon taxes". Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The current preferred approaches are to impose “carbon” taxes and implement various forms of cap and trade or carbon offset systems. However another approach to help reduce carbon emission is to “reward” those who reduce their carbon footprint. It is estimated that consumers control or influence over 60% of all CO2 emissions. As such, one possible reward system of trading “bits and bandwidth for carbon”, or sometimes called "gCommerce" is to provide homeowners with free fiber to the home or free wireless products and other electronic services such as ebooks and eMovies if they agree to pay a premium on their energy consumption which will encourage them to reduce emissions by turning down the thermostat or using public transportation. Not only does the consumer benefit, but this business model also provides new revenue opportunities for network operators, optical equipment manufacturers, and eCommerce application providers.


Universities can also play a significant leadership role as cyber-infrastructure is one of the major producers of CO2 emissions at our universities. Although cyber-infrastructure is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. The beauty of cyber-infrastructure and ICT in general, is that thanks to high speed optical networks, this equipment can be located virtually anywhere. Relocating cyber-infrastructure computers, databases, instrumentation and laboratory equipment to remote renewable energy sites not only helps the environment but can also save the institution significant money in their energy bills. More importantly such a strategy also allows the university or researcher to earn valuable carbon offset dollars. A good example of this strategy is the PROMPT initiative "Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming (G-NGI)" where researchers and institutions can earn valuable offset dollars for Internet technologies and process that reduce CO2 emissions. Universities can also encourage students and faculty to reduce their respective carbon footprint by also implementing a "gCommerce" reward system such as free eTextbooks, free downloads of video and music in exchange for students paying a premium on parking, travel and other related activities.


For more details please see

Free Fiber and High Speed Internet to the Home Initiative
http://free-fiber-to-the-home.blogspot.com/


ICT and Global Warming - opportunities for innovation and economic growth
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgbgjrct_2767dxpbdvcf


PROMPT Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming

http://www.promptinc.org/documents/NGI_release_en_v2.pdf



Thursday, May 8, 2008

Excellent report on Internet Data Centers and Global Warming


This is a good comprehensive report but surprisingly misses the entire subject of Khazzoom-Brookes postulate (aka Jevons Paradox) which refutes the entire argument of energy efficiency. Khazzoom-Brookes have effectively demonstrated that improved efficiency actually results in increased energy consumption as it decreases the overall cost of a product or service and therefore increases demand.

For more details please see my blog on energy efficiency and data centers as well a paper prepared in part for the OECD on this subject. The OECD is also having a workshop where this subject will be discusses in Denmark May 22-23.--BSA]

Paper on Khazzoom-Brookes postulate and datacenters http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgbgjrct_2767dxpbdvcf


Some excerpts from the McKinsey report
http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/168/57

For many industries, data centers are one of the largest sources of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. As a group, their overall emissions are significant, in-scale with industries such as airlines. Even with immediate efficiency improvements (and adoption of new technologies) enterprises and their equipment providers will face increased scrutiny given the projected quadrupling of their data-center GHG emissions by 2020

Significant failings in asset management (6% average server utilization, 56% facility utilization). Up to 30% of servers are dead [i.e. not being used at all, but consuming power nevertheless]

Data center facilities spend (CapEx and OpEx) is a large, quickly growing and very inefficient portion of the total IT budget in many technology intensive industries such as financial services and telecommunications. Some intensive data center users will face meaningfully reduced profitability if current trends continue

True costs are often 4-5x the cost of the server alone over a 5-10 year lifetime of a server

Incremental US demand for data center energy between now and 2010 is equivalent of 10 new power plants

EPA has advocated use of separate energy meters for large data centers
Posted by Bill St. Arnaud at 11:36 AM

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