Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: The impact of cap and trade on your web server

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Monday, November 23, 2009

The impact of cap and trade on your web server

For more information on this item please visit my blog at
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------

[Doug Alder of Rackforce has put together an excellent in-depth analysis of the impact that cap and trade (with carbon at $20/tone) will have on web and computer servers that are located in jurisdictions that are dependent on coal based power. While the pending cap and trade bills in the US Congress will mitigate most of the costs for consumers, industry and institutions will not be similarly protected. The EPA estimates that cap and trade will raise the cost of electricity for these organizations by an “average” of 60% with significantly higher prices in states dependent on coal powered electricity . To put this in context, cap and trade will cost an organization at least an additional $65 -$150 per year per server (200 W) if those servers are located in a coal powered state or province versus a state or province that is powered by renewable energy such as hydro-electricity. Considering that most businesses and universities have thousands of servers, the aggregate bill could be gigantic. Some excerpts from his excellent blog-- BSA

http://www.thealders.net/blogs/2009/11/22/power-sources-and-their-coming-importance-to-your-business/

Power Sources and Their Coming Importance To Your Business
Do you have your own website? If you do it’s hosted on a server. Do you know where that server is located? Do you know the type of carbon footprint that server has where it is hosted? Do you care? If you do pay attention and you’ll learn something.
.
If we look at energy, first we will see how the source of that energy is important when considering the carbon footprint of a data center.

Let’s look at an example of two data centers, one in West Virginia and the other in British Columbia. Based on the data from Stats Canada, Environment Canada, & US Department of Energy that I researched I was able to build a spreadsheet showing the likely carbon cost for operating a server in each province and state (click on image for a readable version)(terms: gCO2eq/Kwh= grams of CO2 equivalent per Kilowatt hour, mTCO2eq/Mwh = grams CO2 equivalent per Megawatt hour, PUE = Power Usage Effectiveness a way of measuring how efficiently a data center uses the incoming power, that is what is the ratio of power used by the data center to the amount of power required to operate the ICT [Infornation Communications Technology] equipment (servers, switches, routers) – 1:1 would be perfect but basically impossible)

Now let’s see what that could mean to your business.

Say each data center is 120,000 sq. ft. raised floor (not at all unusual) Now allow a standard 32 sq. ft. per cabinet. That would give you a maximum number of 3125 racks (120,000/32) and each rack can hold a maximum of 42u worth of gear (a standard rack) but some of that will be the power distribution units of the data center and likely some of their networking gear too, so in general you will get around 36u of usable space. Assume you put 36 1u 200W servers in those slots. That gives you 112,500 servers in those 3125 racks. In BC, each of those servers would cost you an additional $1.06 per year. In West Virginia that would be $65.72 extra per server (the actual results would be higher though as a 120K sq. ft. data center would use up at least 20% of that space on aisles and various components needed to run a data center.) which, translates to $2365.92 instead of $38.16per rack per year extra. How will you justify that extra $2327.76 per rack per year to your shareholders?

The calculations above though were theoretical. They were based on a data center with perfect utilization of energy. That is for every watt of power required to run the ITC equipment in that data center they only used 1 watt of incoming power. Sadly, that is not the case and the average data center today has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 2.5 (and many are much worse – that is an average). That means they need to purchase 2.5 watts of power for every watt they sell to their customers. Now go back to the last paragraph and multiply those final numbers by 2.5. Your extra cost is now $4654.52 per rack.

If your company is a public company then, as carbon taxes and/or carbon Cap &Trade becomes legislated then you will have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to seek out the option that has you paying the least amount of taxes in order to maximize your returns. If you are a private company then you still need to consider the source of what powers your servers lest your competition beats you to it and gets a substantial edge in costs over you.