Green Internet and Cyber-Infrastructure: Overview of Carbon Accounting for Green IT

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, which effectively is a hidden tax. However another approach to help reduce carbon emission is to “reward” those directly who reduce their carbon footprint. 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. 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.

Linking renewable energy with the Internet using eVehicles and pathway charging, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users. For more details please see:

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

World's First Zero Carbon Internet - Greenstar:www.greenstarnetwork.com

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Overview of Carbon Accounting for Green IT

[One of the big challenges we face in the Green IT industry is all the wild and exaggerated claims about the “greenness” of various products and services. As I have blogged many times most people confuse reduction in energy consumption with being green. The real problem facing the planet is not energy consumption but GHG emissions – so it is critically we measure the real objective in any product or service that claims to be green –its actual carbon footprint. Energy reduction or efficiency in many situations can be counter productive and actually increase GHG emissions.

The Canadian Standards Association (CSA), one of the world’s largest standards organizations is developing globally recognized GHG standards based on the ISO 14064 to develop verifiable and auditable measurements of GHG reduction from the use of ICT. This will help quantify whether claims of lower PUE, virtualization or clouds actually do reduce GHG.

They have kindly me allowed to publish the following overview of Carbon Accounting for Green IT. For those who have a genuine interest in moving beyond green washing and help reduce the GHG impact of ICT I suggest you contact the authors listed at the end of this presentation – BSA]

http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/overview-carbonaccountingprotocol-v1

For more information on this item please visit my blog at
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
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email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

Green Internet and Cyber-Infrastructure