Increasingly many government agencies around the world are building data centers in distant locations in order to get access to large feeds of affordable power. Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO points out the federal data centers have doubled their energy use. In a recent talk he stated he is actually anti-data center growth for the traditional model. There are 8 GSA data centers, and 23 homeland security data centers. All built on old models with 100s of millions dollars spent to build data centers the size of city block. There needs to be a new way where there are lower costs and a a greener impact.
The NSA new data centers in Utah and Texas are good examples of this trend as well as NCAR's new data center in Wyoming. Most governments around the world are building new data centers to consolidate servers and address the insatiable demand for more data and storage. Each one of these data centers will consume the power equivalent to the entire municipality of Salt Lake City (about 180,000 souls). In many ways, the data centers are becoming the new industrial heavy users of power, especially as the old manufacturing sector slowly declines and is hollowed out from competition and globalization. Unfortunately most of these new data are using coal based power and now are some of the single biggest new sources of CO2 on the planet.
As the world leaders look to address the challenge of climate change one simple gesture would be a commitment that all new public sector data centers should be built where they can use 100% renewable energy.
Forget about all this silliness with respect to energy efficiency, LEED buildings and low PUE ratios. Locating data centers in jurisdictions with renewable power is the most important step governments can take to reduce their respective carbon footprint. As a minimum government CIOs should not be increasing their nation's carbon footprint by building these facilities in jurisdictions that are entirely dependent on coal fired electricity. For those who are interested I am undertaking a study looking at how government and business CIOs can deploy an internal carbon and energy trading scheme to promote adoption of IT tools to reduce the carbon footprint within their organizations
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/government-cio-and-climate-change
Data Center energy use growing while overall industrial use declines
http://www.greenm3.com/2009/11/data-center-energy-use-growing-while-overall-industrial-use-declines.html
NSA's new data center will consume same amount of power as entire Salt Lake City
http://www.greenm3.com/2009/11/vendor-information-for-nsa-utah-data-center.html
Vivek Kundar the Federal CIO speech on government data centers
http://www.greenm3.com/2010/01/cloud-computing-open-source-containers-federal-govt-new-appsgov-model.html
The UK Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) also indicates a future direction of how the cost of energy will also government computer operations. The CRC is a groundbreaking piece of legislation designed to help the UK meet its carbon reduction targets by 2020. Basically, the CRC scheme will apply to organisations that had a half-hourly metered electricity consumption greater than 6,000 MWh per year in 2008. Organisations qualifying for CRC would have all their energy use covered by the scheme, this includes emissions from direct energy use as well as electricity purchased. Initially, it is estimated, around 5,000 organisations will qualify, including supermarkets, water companies, banks, local authorities and all central Government Departments.
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/lc_uk/crc/crc.aspx
My talk on the important leadership role government CIOs can play in addressing climate change
http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/government-cio-and-climate-change
e-mail: Bill.st.arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
Blog: http://green-broadband.blogspot.com
This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles
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.
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