This blogs talks about how the Internet and cyber-infrastructure can help create a low carbon society
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:
[This is one of many reasons why I have argued that ICT energy efficiency is not sufficient. The growth in usage of computer gadgets will dwarf any gains in energy efficiency.
[These days Australia seems to be firing on all cylinders and demonstrating true political leadership on a number of fronts from carbon pricing, deploying national broadband, through to eResearch and more recently announcing the worlds’ largest Green IT research center.
[There has been a lot of buzz in the press about the recent news of Nortel selling some of its address space to Microsoft for $7.5m which works out to $11.25 per IP address.
Electricity that powers electric motors is the best replacement for fossil fuels that power internal combustion engines. As discussed in my lastpost, connecting to the grid while in motion is the best means of powering electric vehicles.
[At the recent On*vector workshop in San Diego, Dallas Thorton of the San Diego Computer Center (SDSC) gave an excellent presentation on the CANARIE funded UCSD-McGill project looking at the overall cost savings by relocating a facility like the SDSC to Canada.
