Green Internet and Cyber-infrastructure Overview

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. However another approach to help reduce carbon emission is to “reward” those directly who reduce their carbon footprint and complement their existing lifestyle. One possible reward system 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 deploy micro renewable energy sources for their ICT equipment and use eVehicles for energy transportation. Not only does the consumer benefit, but this business model also provides new revenue opportunities for small businesses, network operators, and eCommerce application providers.

Linking renewable energy with the Internet using 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. For more details please see:

How North American suburban sprawl could be the answer to global warning: http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Building Zero Carbon Networks: http://goo.gl/juWdH


Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Australian govt sets out ICT carbon reduction targets

[Kudos to the Australian government on this important step. I estimate such a Green ICT strategy would save up to $100 million for the Canadian government and over $1 billion for US government (more details to follow). All governments are under serious financial pressure to cut costs – a green ICT strategy is the low hanging fruit and does not need cutting jobs or pay. Relocating data centers to low carbon/low energy sites is an important first step ]

http://bit.ly/dpS2a8

Australian govt sets out ICT carbon reduction targets

Australia’s Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, has reportedly laid out a target to cut roughly 13% of the carbon emissions from its data centre operations over the next five years.

According to this report by ITwire,Tanner told a conference at CeBIT that the Australian government is the largest data centre operator in the country - larger than the country’s four big banks combined.

The goal is to reduce the estimated 300,000 tonnes of emissions annually today by 40,000 tonnes on an annual basis in five years, Tanner said.

Under a 15-year data centre strategy announced by Tanner, all departments and agencies will have to measure and report the energy consumption of their data centres and ICT infrastructure annually.

Tanner added that future government procurement of data centres will put a major consideration on the ‘green credentials’ of the site and infrastructure. The locations of data centres, as well as other contributing factors, such as free air cooling, and access to telecommunications and power infrastructure would also play key parts in the decision making process. The new procurement parametres will come into effect in the second half of the year.
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