Reducing CO2 - a new "for profit" service for telcos

[Many telcos have undertaken initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint, both as a cost saving measure, and also to show themselves as being good corporate citizens. But some telcos are starting to realize that these measures to reduce their own carbon footprint can also be an attractive business offering for their corporate customers. Large corporations face the same challenges as telcos with the high cost of power and the insatiable demand from IT for additional energy to power their ever growing number of servers. Governments are also starting to mandate public sector organizations to become carbon neutral, and soon may mandate private companies to be carbon neutral as well which is being further spurred on with the advent of carbon taxes.

Telcos are well suited to deploy zero carbon data centers in remote locations with plenty of cheap renewable power connected by high speed optical networks. BT is a good example where they plan to build COs powered by on-site windmills. These sites will not only serve BT's needs, but are also ideal for hosting customer's IT equipment as well. More importantly the telco and customer can earn valuable carbon offset dollars which can defray most of the expensive of locating servers at these sites. Some telcos are also following the lead of companies like IBM and Fujitsu and arranging for the brokering of carbon offset dollars for their customers who relocate IT equipment to their zero carbon data centers.

Using local generated renewable power is lot a cheaper than "wheeling" green power from the utilities. It also guarantees the telco and their customers a long term supply of cheap power with no threat of disruption or cost increases by the local utility.

Reduced carbon emissions is also a service that can offered to broadband residential customers, and is way of providing guaranteed revenue for the telco to pay for the fiber infrastructure that is necessary to support zero carbon applications. The telco is no longer dependent on the fickle revenues of triple play or the competitive threat of the "over top" players such as Google etc. Please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com for details. Some excerpts from Converge Digest and Economist--BSA]

www.convergedigest.com

BT Plans 80% CO2 Reduction by 2020
BT announced a goal to cut its carbon emissions intensity by 80 percent across the globe by 2020 , setting one of the most aggressive corporate carbon reduction targets worldwide.

The company also published a new model for measuring and tracking carbon emissions – backed by the Carbon Disclosure Project. This represents an important step in measuring carbon emissions in a consistent way across the globe.

BT said it intends to meet the 80 percent reduction target through a continued combination of energy efficiency, on-site renewable generation (aiming for 25 per cent of its UK electricity to come from dedicated wind turbines by 2016) and purchased low-carbon electricity.

BT estimated that it has already reduced emissions in the UK by nearly 60 percent between 1996 and 2008.

The majority of worldwide CO2 emissions result from activities in the corporate sector, but up until now it has not been clear what targets an individual corporation needs to achieve to make its contribution to the international challenge. http://www.btplc.com 02-Jun-08

In October 2007, BT announced plans to develop wind farms aimed at generating up to 25% of its existing UK electricity requirements by 2016. The company expects to invest up to £250m in the project.

BT is one of Britain's biggest consumers of electricity, with an annual requirement of around 0.7% of the UK's entire consumption. The company said its wind farms could generate a total of 250MW of electricity – enough to meet the power needs of 122,000 homes or a city the size of Coventry.

BT is currently identifying high wind-yield sites on or adjacent to BT-owned land for development with the aim of generating power from 2012 onwards.


http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11413148

Down on the server farm

The real-world implications of the rise of internet computing

As computing becomes a utility, with services that can be consumed from everywhere and on any device, ever more thought is being put into where to put the infrastructure it needs.

Data centres are essential to nearly every industry and have become as vital to the functioning of society as power stations are. Lately, centres have been springing up in unexpected places: in old missile bunkers, in former shopping malls—even in Iceland. America alone has more than 7,000 data centres, according to IDC, a market-research firm. And each is housing ever more servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data. In America the number of servers is expected to grow to 15.8m by 2010—three times as many as a decade earlier.

Companies have been packing ever more machines into data centres, both to increase their computing capacity and to comply with new data-retention rules.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft's $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

And with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility. It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape.


Yet it will not just be market economics that determines the shape of the clouds. Local governments give tax breaks in the hope that the presence of big data centres will attract other businesses (the computing plants themselves usually employ only a few dozen people

In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.