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:
[I recently stumbled across a very cool app called EchoSign that allows for electronic transmission and signature of all sorts of documents such as NDAs, expense claims, contract revisions, patient signatures, etc.
[Another excellent analysis by Greenpeace on the threat that the Internet poses in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The dramatic growth of the data centers that power the Internet are the heavy industry of the information age.
[Here is a great article on some of the ongoing research with electric roads in Korea and USA. As I have blogged before electric roads can be powered solely by independent roadside windmills or solar panels, owned and operated by small businesses.
