Electronic Gadgets

[As many of you may know I have long argued for a program similar to cap and dividend where the money from a cap and trade system or carbon taxes is returned directly to consumers. However I have advocated that we use carbon rewards where instead of simply returning money to consumers we create a virtuous circle where the consumer is rewarded with virtual products and services delivered over the Internet. For more details please see http://green-broadband.blogspot.com-- BSA]

Cap and Dividend versus Cap and reward

Cap-and-dividend: the jolt Harper needs?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/cap-and-dividend-the-jolt-harper-needs/article1461994/


http://www.good.is/post/the-third-way-carbon-cap-and-dividend

Can we settle the carbon pricing debate by giving the money back to the people?

The loudest debate in climate policy at the moment is no longer about whether or not there should be a price on carbon emissions (there will be), but rather how to go about pricing the most dangerous greenhouse gas.

As long as this debate has been going on, two camps have emerged as the favorites of conventional wisdom—the widely lauded cap-and-trade system and the underdog, a straight-up carbon tax. Plenty of ink has been spilled criticizing and defending the two. Cap-and-trade, say the tax camp, would be too complicated, too riddled with loopholes, and too easy for Washington to screw up. A tax, counter C&Ters, is a political nonstarter, enough said. Both proposals, though, share a problem that more or less renders all other points moot: if you make energy more expensive to produce, you make energy more expensive to buy. Meaning that until clean energy gets cheaper (which it will), anyone with a home to heat, a Civic to fill, or a refrigerator to keep cool is going to take a hit in the wallet. Meaning the voting public isn’t going to be happy about putting a price on carbon. Meaning elected officials aren’t going to support it. (See: the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, a pretty weak carbon pricing plan that was still, more or less, dead on arrival.)

True, scientific—and economic—evidence now creates an even stronger case for urgent greenhouse gas reductions than it did even a year ago when Lieberman-Warner was introduced. And, true, leadership on Capitol Hill and in the White House are much more amenable to firm action on climate change than they were even on January 19th. (And that’s a whopper of an understatement.) But it’s still pretty much impossible to see a filibuster-busting 60 senators standing behind any proposal that—in the eyes of their respective constituencies—simply makes energy cost more.

Enter the Great Third Way, more formally known as cap-and-dividend. The cap part is familiar—a set number of pollution permits would be auctioned off, placing a firm, predetermined, and annually-dropping ceiling on carbon emissions. Cap-and-dividend’s first twist away from the typical cap-and-trade orthodoxy comes in where, exactly, the carbon is capped. Historically, cap-and-trade systems—like the acid rain program that so effectively reduced sulfur dioxide in the early 1990s—place a cap at the end of the industrial cycle, where the pollution left the smokestack. That’s easy enough to do when there are relatively few factories and plants emitting SO2.

This still leads to pricier power—the mine will charge more for the coal, and your utility will send along a higher bill for electricity. Which brings us to the meat of this “third way”—the dividend.

All (or most) of the revenue raised from carbon permit auctions would go back, in equal shares, to the American people. Barnes calls it an “Atmospheric Trust” that would work like the Alaskan Permanent Fund, which sends everyone in the state a check each year for their share of oil revenue.


We’ll soon find out. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) is introducing a bill this week that would cap carbon emissions by 2012 and distribute 90 percent of revenue from an “upstream” auction directly to Americans in the form of monthly dividend checks. Van Hollen already has one supporter in Barnes, who called the bill “beautiful.” Time to see if the American public and their elected reps agree.

http://www.capanddividend.org/

------
email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

[As I have blogged previously Government and other not-for-profit sector CIOs such as universities are soon going to be under the gun as the primary agents for reducing GHG emissions in their respective organizations. Information Technology (IT) is responsible up to 50% of the electrical consumption in most of these organizations. But IT has the most tools at hand and greatest flexibility in order to reduce its carbon footprint. Compared to reducing our carbon footprint in other aspects of our lives, IT should be relatively easy. As mentioned in this press release the Government is the single largest energy consumer and it government has a responsibility to its citizens to reduce its own footprint. This is a fantastic annoucement by Obama but is undermined by his own administrations activities where the GSA , NSA and NCRA are build mamoth data centers powered solely by coal fired electrcity in Utah, Wyoming etc . See http://green-broadband.blogspot.com for more details- BSA]



http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/30/obama-federal-government-wide-energy-emissions-cut/

WASHINGTON, DC - President Barack Obama today announced that the Federal Government will reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution by 28 percent by 2020. Reducing and reporting GHG pollution, as called for in Executive Order 13514 on Federal Sustainability, will ensure that the Federal Government leads by example in building the clean energy economy. Actions taken under this Executive Order will spur clean energy investments that create new private-sector jobs, drive long-term savings, build local market capacity, and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in clean energy industries.

As the single largest energy consumer in the U.S. economy, the Federal Government spent more than $24.5 billion on electricity and fuel in 2008 alone. Achieving the Federal GHG pollution reduction target will reduce Federal energy use by the equivalent of 646 trillion BTUs, equal to 205 million barrels of oil, and taking 17 million cars off the road for one year. This is also equivalent to a cumulative total of $8 to $11 billion in avoided energy costs through 2020. "

As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient," said President Obama. "Our goal is to lower costs, reduce pollution, and shift Federal energy expenses away from oil and towards local, clean energy."

Federal Departments and Agencies will achieve greenhouse gas pollution reductions by measuring their current energy and fuel use, becoming more energy efficient and shifting to clean energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal. Examples of agency actions that are underway are available on the White House Council on Environmental Quality website and can be found at www.whitehouse.gov/ceq .

[As many of you know I have long complained about the current generation of smart meters. They are too focused on the needs of the electrical utility in terms of minimizing peak load, and have little benefit to the consumer or the environment. In most electrical systems the utility owns and controls the meter. This reminds me of the days when the telephone company owned the telephone which greatly inhibited innovation. It wasn't until regulators forced the telcos to allow direct interconnection of devices to the network that computer and networking revolution took off. I think we face the same challenge with Smart meters. In Germany companies can arrange to interconnect their own government approved meter directly. And as you can see from this article it is already creating innovation. I am also see that Google's new power meter is all about bypassing the utility. Most exciting is the IETF is now undertaking development of protocols for Smart Grids.&nb sp; The IETF has always been the per-eminent standards body because of its insistence on meritocracy rather than politics to drive standards and a can-do culture of "rough consensus and working code". The IETF and the Internet developed the essential protocols that freed us from the tyranny of the telco and their walled gardens, hopefully they will do the same thing for the utilities and smart grids, Some excerpts -- BSA]




Why Google’s PowerMeter Gadget Partnership Is a Big Power Play
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://gigaom.com/2009/10/06/why-googles-powermeter-gadget-partnership-is-a-big-power-play/

With Google’s endless projects — from book search to a browser killer to Blogger — you’re probably wondering why I’m so excited about a new partnership deal for the company’s PowerMeter energy management tool. Well, here’s why: For the first time, consumers can now access PowerMeter via a gadget called the TED-5000, made by startup Energy Inc., and users don’t need to go through their utility or have a smart meter (a digital two-way electricity meter) installed to access it. In other words, Google has finally bypassed the utility with PowerMeter, which is an important step for both bringing consumer energy management products to the mainstream, and pushing utilities to more quickly embrace information technology networks and broadband.



From a posting by Richard Shockey on David Farber's IPer list

To: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Subject: The IETF and the SmartGrid


The general internet community needs to be aware of activities in North
America that directly relate to the use of IETF protocols in the Electric
Utility industry. This activity is generally referred to as the SmartGrid.
Though the issues immediately deal with technical and policy decisions in
the US and Canada, the SmartGrid concept is gaining significant momentum in
Europe and Asia as well.

http://www.smartgrids.eu/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid#Countries


The SmartGrid has many definitions but as a practical matter it is a
substantial re-architecture of the data communications networks that
utilities use to maintain the stability and reliability of their power
grids. Many of the requirements for the SmartGrid in North America came out
of the 2003 North East power outage which demonstrated a substantial lack of
investment in Utility IT systems.

http://www.ferc.gov/EventCalendar/Files/20040915141105-blackout.pdf

Of particular note, is the desire by utilities to extend the reach of their
communications networks directly to the utility meter and beyond ultimately
into the customer premise itself. This is generally referred to as the
Advanced Meter Interface (AMI). One of the use cases driving this
requirement is the next generation of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The
utilities, correctly IMHO, want to precisely control the timing of how these
vehicles are recharged so not to create a unique form of DOS attack and take
out the grid when everyone goes home at night. This is a principal use case
in 6lowpan ( ID below ). Increasingly energy flows are becoming
bi-directional creating needs for more computational intelligence and
capability at the edge.

What is going on? Why should the IETF community care?

The United States Government, as part of the Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007 gave the National Institute of Standards and Technology
( NIST ) principal responsibility "to coordinate development of a framework
that includes protocols and model standards" for the SmartGrid.

http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/


After several meetings sponsored by NIST in recent months, NIST released a
preliminary report. Several folks from the IETF community attended those
meetings, myself included. There multiple troubling stories about how those
meetings were organized but I'll leave those tales to others.

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/smartgrid_interoperability.pdf

One of the requests from NIST and the SmartGrid community was a list of Core
Internet protocols that NIST could refer to. Fred Baker has been working on
that task. ( below )

Myself and others are deeply concerned by how this effort is developing.
There is no current consensus on what the communications architecture of the
SmartGrid is or how IP actually fits into it.

The Utility Industry does not understand the current IPv4 number exhaust
problem and the consequences of that if they want to put a IP address on
every Utility Meter in North America.

What is equally troubling is that many of the underlying protocols that
utilities wish to deploy are not engineered for IPv6. We have an example of
that in a recent ID.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-c1222-transport-over-ip-01.txt


Obviously, there are significant CyberSecurity issues in the SmartGrid
concept and NIST has produced a useful document outlining the requirements
and usecases.

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/nistir-7628/draft-nistir-7628.pdf

How the SmartGrid interfaces with or bridges with Home Area or Enterprise
Local Area networks is unclear, to put it mildly.

I want to use this message to encourage the community to read the attached
documents and get involved in this effort as appropriate. Additional NIST
documents will be published shortly with a open public comment period.

I strongly urge members of the IETF community to participate in this comment
period and lend its expertise as necessary.

It's useful and important work.

************************


Title : Core Protocols in the Internet Protocol Suite
Author(s) : F. Baker
Filename : draft-baker-ietf-core-03.txt
Pages : 32
Date : 2009-10-03

This note attempts to identify the core of the Internet Protocol Suite. The
target audience is NIST, in the Smart Grid discussion, as they have
requested guidance on how to profile the Internet Protocol Suite. In
general, that would mean selecting what they need from the picture presented
here.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-baker-ietf-core-03.txt







What Cisco Can Learn From A Yello Strom Smart Grid Pilot
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://earth2tech.com/2009/10/05/what-cisco-can-learn-from-a-yello-strom-smart-grid-pilot/

Networking giant Cisco could learn a whole lot from its partnership with German utility Yello Strom, which I once called the coolest utility in the world, and which focuses heavily on smart grid consumer hardware and the use of the Internet for the power grid. While Cisco included Yello Strom as a partner in its smart grid announcement last month, the networking company announced more details about a 70-home pilot project using Yello Strom’s sophisticated “Sparzähler” or smart meter this morning. If Cisco aims to some day develop a Linksys-based home energy management product, the project detailed today could provide some important information for that effort.



Yello Strom is also one of the only utilities I’ve heard of that has developed and sells its own sophisticated smart meters. In July Martin Vesper, Yello Strom’s executive director, told us that the company looked at the smart meters that were already available on the market, and found only tools that focused on helping energy efficiency from a utility perspective. Not seeing anything they liked, or anything that would get consumers excited, they developed their own, which looks like it would be at home in the window of an Apple store, is built off of Microsoft Windows CE, and has both a small web server and client inside. Yello’s meter is a lot more sophisticated than other smart meters.

This unusual environment — a sophisticated, innovative smart meter, and potentially a home broadband connection — will be a very interesting environment within which Cisco can run a pilot program. It could enable Cisco to get an interesting perspective for how it could roll out any type of Linksys, broadband-based, home energy management product, which Cisco has actively been looking into




Are Returns from Smart Grid Investments Too Weak for VCs?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://earth2tech.com/2009/09/29/are-returns-for-smart-grid-investments-too-weak-for-vcs/

The smart grid might be the Megan Fox of cleantech right now (hot), but will venture-backed smart grid startups be able to deliver the type of returns that VCs commonly like (somewhere around 10 times their investment)? Not really, suggested venture capitalist Vinod Khosla at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference in Sausalito, Calif., earlier this month (watch the video clip here). During a panel on the first morning of the event Khosla called smart grid investments from a VC perspective “interesting, but marginal,” at “10 to 15 percent.”

Indeed, Khosla hasn’t made any direct investments in bringing information technology to the power grid over the years, despite the fact that he played a fundamental role in the development of information technology — as co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an investor with Kleiner Perkins funding broadband firms like Juniper.



--
--------------
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
blog:http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/

Great presentation by Rod Wilson from Nortel (sorry Ciena) and Jerry Sheehan of UCSD (Cal-It2)

see http://bit.ly/C9qzq

Bill

[I have had the distinct pleasure of being introduced to 2 very cool zero carbon Internet companies - which to mind exemplify the future of the Internet. They also illustrate that the future high tech business opportunities are in building solutions for a zero carbon economy. The first is a new search engine company (www.lavva.com) that links search queries with social networks of people making similar searches. But what is quite unique is the company's servers are solely powered at renewable energy sites around North America including various solar and hydro powered data centers. The second company is Eseri (www.eseri.com) which provides a green virtual desktop based IT solution, integrated from 75 of the world's best open source software components. The system is hosted in an enterprise class data center running on low power optimized servers, using green hydro power in Montreal, Quebec. Access is through fully interactive virtua l desktops from any device anywhere you can access the Internet. ESERI combines the best of open source with clouds. It is an ideal solution for those who are keen on using open source on their desk top but are scared off in setting up Ubuntu or similar OS and all the attendant open source applications. The other attraction of combining open source with clouds is that you dont get vendor lock in with either the application software or with the cloud services. You can move your applications and data off the service at any time. Well worth checking out --BSA]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8297237.stm


Since the financial crisis, Iceland has been forced to retreat back from high octane bubble living to nature.

Not, you might think, the most obvious place to stick millions of the world's computer servers which are, for all their uses, rather less attractive.

But the country now wants exactly that - to become home to the world's computing power.

Behind all the large internet companies lurk massive and ever growing data centres chock full of servers churning away.

Google for instance is thought to have around a million of the things, but even less IT intensive operations, banks for example, need hundreds of thousands of servers to store all their data.

Thermal image of a computer
Up to 60% extra energy is required to cool computer servers in the UK

The problem is that while these computers look innocuous, they use a lot of energy.

There is of course the power you need for the servers themselves, but almost as significant is the energy used to keep them cool.

"For every watt that is spent running servers," says Dr Brad Karp, of University College London, "the best enterprises most careful about minimising the energy of cooling and maximising efficiency typically find they are spending 40-60% extra energy on just cooling them."

Cold rush

In Iceland, with its year round cool climate and chilly fresh water, just a fraction of this energy for cooling is needed. It means big savings.

Just outside Reykjavik, work is well advanced on the first site which its owners hope will spark a server cold rush.

In around a year - if all goes according to plan - the first companies will start leasing space in this data centre.

And if this proves successful more sites are planned.

The company expects demand to be huge because as the number of servers around the world grows, a big environmental cloud is looming - all that energy use means an increase in CO2 production.

Iceland has far more power than it can domestically use.

"The data centre industry now is on par with the airline industry as far as the carbon footprint," says Jeff Monroe, head of Verne Global - a data centre company working in Iceland.


Jeff Monroe
A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually
Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global

"But, if you think about the growth of those two industries, the growth of the data centre industry is exponentially greater than the airline industry.

"The two are going to cross and we think that - just like the legislation that was passed in the UK concerning carbon footprint and power utilisation - it is going to be a growing concern across the industry."

So data centres are already producing as much CO2 as airlines.

While it has been below the radar until now, Verne Global thinks that with cloud computing on the rise, the carbon footprint of the digital world will soon become "unacceptably high".

And this is where Iceland's natural resources really come into their own.

Enormous savings

The volcanic forces which shaped the landscape have also gifted the country masses of geothermal power - 100% of the country's electricity is renewable and basically carbon free, much generated from water heated far below the ground.

Mr Monroe explains what would happen if a company moved its data centre to Iceland.

"The carbon savings would be enormous.

Icelandic power station
All of Iceland's electricity is renewable and basically carbon free

"For example, if a large internet media company operating thousands and thousands of servers relocated its servers to Iceland, that company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually."

So you have the cooler climate and an abundance of green energy.

But you would not want to move your previous data centre to what is effectively the middle of nowhere unless it had some good connections.

Iceland has been busying itself laying fibre optic cables to connect the country with North America and Europe.

The cables coming in provide a capacity of more than five terabits/sec - all with server farms in mind.

Travelling down this pipe, data sited in Iceland is just 17 milliseconds from London. Sitting at home on YouTube you would never know, but even that is too slow for some.

Big industry

Gudmundur Gunnarsson, head of communications company Farice, explains some of the problems.

"There are very sensitive financial services that cannot even go outside the M25 in London", he says.

"So everything has to be within that circle, but for approximately at least 70% of other traffic, this delay is more than satisfactory."

Even where speed is not an issue however, the allure of Iceland is not for everyone.

Companies will have to overcome their natural server-hugging tendencies, and some may harbour security fears of storing their data remotely.

But having been through the financial mill Iceland hopes and believes in the next five to 10 years this will be one of its biggest industries.

And, in an irony not lost on a country brought to its knees by finance, one early customer rumoured to have signed a deal to move servers here is - well who else - one of America's biggest investment banks.

[Some people may think this commentary is too strident and over the top, but Robin Chase I believe eloquently captures the urgency of doing something about climate change -- bSA]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-chase/fossil-fuel-is-the-new-sl_b_310007.html


Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt

A century and a half ago, fossil fuels replaced slaves as the underpriced energy source driving American economic growth. And like slavery, our deep economic dependence makes change difficult, despite the incontrovertible reality that our fossil-fueled system is profoundly wrong. America could not thrive while captured by the slave economy, nor can she thrive while in thrall to a carbon-based economy.

It required almost a hundred years and a devastating civil war to rid the US of slavery. Business interests fought to retain the morally and economically corrupt status quo. Favorable economics prompted blindness and slow response to the moral imperative for ending slavery. Favorable economics today cloud the minds of many legislators and business interests to cling to our system of underpriced fossil fuels. Despite the best efforts of Congressmen Waxman and Markey, the climate bill out of Congress proposed 2020 goals of only 17 percent reductions in CO2 over 2005 levels and passed by the narrowest of margins. Science tells us our 2020 goals need to 25 to 40% reductions over 1990 levels. Senators Boxer and Kerry have proposed 20%, a step in the right direction.

Ownership of another human being and reaping the benefit of their labor is repugnant. While burning fossil fuels is not as intimately observable or viscerally felt, a direct link from our actions to real individual suffering can be traced.

It takes a look back at the past several decades to appreciate the true costs of burning fossil fuel: air, water, and soil pollution, environmental degradation, wars and military entanglements to protect access to the sources, transfer of American's earning to foreign economies, political empowerment of those we buy from, and climate change. Unfortunately, our individual pocketbooks don't feel the true costs of what it takes for Americans to enjoy the energy derived from a ton of coal, or a barrel of oil. And that's why we make so little effort to use it efficiently, conservatively, or wisely. Drill, baby, drill. Burn, baby, burn.

And there will be more casualties. The best estimates of the slave trade's death toll are 15 to 20 million people over its 400-year history. Failure to move to a new low-carbon energy source will result in a similar magnitude of unforgivable suffering and death. The World Health Organization says that climate change was responsible for 300,000 deaths this last year, predicting as many as 9 million excess deaths over the next 20 years alone. Almost all of these initial victims will be among Africa and Asia's poorest who have no voice and no vote with regard to what happens in the US Congress.

Slavery destroyed familial and cultural bonds as well as removed the ability to earn a living. The same goes for global warming. Long-held ways of life are disappearing rapidly as ice melts, rains don't come, and sea levels rise. The Global Humanitarian Forum, recently released a report stating that 2030 will also see 310 million more people suffering adverse health consequences related to increased temperature, 20 million more people falling into poverty, and 75 million extra people displaced by climate change -- in addition to the excess deaths.

Delaying real change is intolerable. Unlike slavery, the global warming legacy will be forever irreparable and unrecoverable. New predictions indicate a good chance of a nine degree global temperature increase this century. What we eat, where we live, how we live, and indeed who lives will be changed. Forever. Again, we face an undeniable moral imperative.

This fall, Congress continues the debate over how quickly our country addresses our broken energy status quo. Just as in moral battles fought before, the correct action and way of life will ultimately prevail. Let's pass a climate bill that reduces CO2 emissions, on a timetable and in a quantity that science dictates, to avert the terrible calamity and suffering that lies ahead if we don't.

Back in 1860, our country was at a frightening and wrenching crossroads as we faced what appeared to many Americans to be an impossibly difficult decision: to accept the line drawn of no new expansion of its morally corrupt energy source and to commit to building America's future on a new economic footing. Today, we are at the same crossroads. Americans will ultimately deliver the correct moral response. The question is, can we do it in time to avert unpardonable suffering around the globe and without tearing our nation in two?

Follow Robin Chase on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rmchase



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-chase/fossil-fuel-is-the-new-sl_b_310007.html

[Dan Reed is well known in the academic computing and cyber-infrastructure community. Dan is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Extreme Computing where he also works with Tony Hey –the founder of eScience in the UK. Previously, he was the Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, as well as the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Chancellor’s Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation for UNC Chapel Hill. Dr. Reed has served as a member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and as a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). He has also been Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC, where he also led National Computational Science Alliance, a fifty institution partnership devoted to creating the next generation of computational science tools. He was also one of the
principal investigators and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid
.

Dan Reed recently gave a great presentation on the Future of Cyber-Infrastructure at a SURA meeting. You can see a copy of his presentation at http://www.sura.org/news/2009/it_matsf.html

His basic thesis is that the bulk of academic computing will probably move to commercial clouds. Although there will still remain some very high end close coupled applications that need dedicated supercomputers the majority of academic computing can be done with clouds. Despite the presence of grids and HPC on our campuses most academic applications still run on small clusters in closets or stand alone servers. Moreover the challenge with academic grids is building robust, high quality middleware for distributed systems and solving the myriad political problems of sharing computation resources in different management domains. As well, the ever increasing costs of energy, space and cooling will soon force researchers to start looking for computing alternatives. Clouds are solution to many of these
problem and in many ways represent the commercialization of the original vision for grids.

Dan also ruminates about the possibility of building “follow the
sun/follow the wind” cloud architecture on his blog, which of course
is music to my ears:

http://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2009/08/egg-baskets-lambdas-and-geo-resilience.html

[…]

**Geo-dispersion: The Other Alternative **

If it were possible to replicate data and computation across multiple, geographically distributed data centers, one could reduce or eliminate UPS costs, and the failure of a single data center would not disrupt the cloud service or unduly affect its customers. Rather, requests to the service would simply be handled by one of the service replicas at another data center, perhaps with slightly greater latency due to time of flight delays. This is, of course, more easily imagined than implemented, but its viability is assessable on both economic and technical grounds.

In this spirit, let me begin by suggesting that we may need to
rethink our definition of broadband WANs. Today, we happily talk of
deploying 10 Gb/s lambdas, and some of our fastest transcontinental
and international networks provision a small number of lambdas (i.e.,
10, 40 or 100 Gb/s). However, a single mode optical fiber

has much higher total capacity with current dense wave division
multiplexing
(DWDM) technology, and typical multistrand cables contain many
fibers. Thus, the cable has an aggregate bandwidth of many terabits,
even with current DWDM.

Despite the aggregate potential bandwidth of the cables, we are
really provisioning many narrowband WANs across a single fiber.
Rarely, if ever, do we consider bonding all of those lambdas to
provision a single logical network. What might one do with terabits of
bandwidth between data centers? If one has the indefeasible right to
use
(IRU) or owns the dark fiber

, one need only provision the equipment to exploit multiple fibers
for a single purpose.

Of course, exploiting this WAN bandwidth would necessitate dramatic
change in the bipartite separation of local area networks (LANs) and
WANs in cloud data centers. Melding these would also expose the full
bisection bandwidth of the cloud data center to the WAN and its
interfaces, simplifying data and workload replication and moving us
closer to true geo-dispersion and geo-resilience. There are deep
technical issues related to on-chip photonics

, VCSELs

and ROADMs

, among others, to make this a reality.

In the end, these technical questions devolve to risk assessment and
economics. First, the cost of replicated, smaller data centers without
UPS must be less than that of a larger, non-replicated data center
with UPS. Second, the wide area network (WAN) bandwidth, its fusion
with data center LANs and their cost must be included in the economic
assessment.

These are interesting technical and economic questions, and I invite
economic analyses and risk assessments. I suspect, though, that it is
time we embraced the true meeting of high-speed networking and put our
eggs in multiple baskets.

From Slashdot
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/11/17/157231/CERN-Physicist-Warns-About-Uranium-Shortage

"Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone, but it comes up about 25,000 tons short of what we consume yearly in our nuclear power plants. The difference is made up by stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium — which should be completely used up by 2013. And the problem with just opening more uranium mines is that nobody really knows where to go for the next big uranium lode. Dr. Michael Dittmar has been warning us for some time about the coming shortage (PDF) and has recently uploaded a four-part comprehensive report on the future of nuclear energy and how socioeconomic change is exacerbating the effect this coming shortage will have on our power consumption. Although not quite on par with zombie apocalypse, Dr. Dittmar's final conclusions paint a dire picture, stating that options like large-scale commercial fission breeder reactors are not an option by 2013 and 'no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"

Dr Dittmar's study:
http://www.aspo-ireland.org/contentfiles/ASPO6/3-2_APSO6_MDittmar.pdf

[With the growing power of supercomputers and data centers, people
are starting to realize that cyber-infrastructure may soon have a
significant impact on the environment because of its huge electrical
consumption and the resultant CO2 emissions if the electricity that
powers these systems comes from coal fired electrical plants. As I
mentioned in a previous blog the UK Meteorological Office new
supercomputer is one of the single biggest sources of CO2 emissions
(Scope 2) in the UK. Paradoxically this is the same computer that is
being used for climate modeling in that country. Thanks to a pointer
from Steve Goldstein we learn that even America’s spy agency –NSA,
is also running into energy issues and as such is building a huge new
data centers in Utah and Texas, of which both will probably use dirty
coal based electricity as well. There are also rumors that NCAR is
building a new cyber-infrastructure center in Wyoming (presumably
which will also use coal based electricity) which sort of undermines
its own credibility as America’s leading climate research institute.
I suspect very shortly with all the new announcements of grids and
supercomputers from OSG to Jaguar, that cyber-infrastructure
collectively in the US will be one of the top sources of CO2 emissions
as it is now in the UK. This is an unsustainable path and will come to
haunt those cyber-infrastructure organizations, particularly if
Congress passes a cap and trade bill. Cap and trade will increase the
price of electricity for institutions and businesses by an
“average” of 60% according to the EPA. But electrical prices will
be substantially more in states that are totally dependent on coal
fired electrical generation. Not only that, under the proposed cap and
trade bills any organization that emits over 25,000 tons of CO2 per
year (which includes most universities and research institutions) will
be required to purchase emission allowances or offsets if they want to
exceed their current level of emissions. It is not only traditional
power generators, cement plants or manufacturers that will be affected
by cap and trade. Most of the US higher ed and cyber-infrastructure
research facilities will be similarly affected. However there is some
good news: Cyber-infrastructure, if done right, can be a powerful tool
for reducing CO2 emissions. Larry Smarr and I recently gave a talk on
this topic at Educause which is now available per the link below –
BSA]

Cyber-Infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World

http://educause.mediasite.com/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=2719597468ab467382691f0915f524e0

See also article in Educause Review

http://www.educause.edu/er

Slides are available on Slideshare

http://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/educause09-smarr-arnaud

Weather supercomputer used to predict climate change is one of
Britain's worst polluters

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209430/Weather-supercomputer-used-predict-climate-change-Britains-worst-polluters.html

The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was
revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate
change is one of Britain's worst polluters. The massive machine - the
UK's most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of
memory - was installed in the Met Office's headquarters in Exeter,
Devon. It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to
feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run -
enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

New NSA data centers in Utah and Texas

From http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231

"..."As strange as it may sound," he writes, "one of the most urgent
problems facing NSA is a severe shortage of electrical power." With
supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual
electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning
out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and
Texas. And as it pleads for more money to construct newer and bigger
power generators, Aid notes, Congress is balking.

"The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is
political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the
kilowatt.

More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger data
centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and
e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the
more reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more
political power for the agency.

[A great example of a forward thinking ISP. No mention of whether
thay also plan to earn carbon offsets by going carbon neutral. Some
excerpts -- BSA]

Australian ISP goes carbon-neutral
http://www.telecomasia.net/content/australian-isp-goes-carbon-neutral?page=0%2C0

While most carriers are reluctant even to set targets for reducing
their carbon footprint, Australian ISP Internode has already been
carbon-neutral for a year.

The company, which has over 170,000 subscribers Australia-wide,
sources 100% of its electricity needs from renewable energy, and has
molded its equipment upgrade purchasing decisions towards energy
efficiency and sustainability.



The company has also started to invest in its own renewable energy
infrastructure, choosing to run a number of remote sites via solar
cells. With operators forced to pay a premium for piping power to
remote areas - and to provide expensive, long-lasting battery backups
- it is becoming cost-competitive to run these sites on solar, Lindsay
said.

Becoming carbon-neutral is “not as expensive an undertaking as most
people looking at it would imagine,” Lindsay said. In South
Australia, green power costs around 20% more than traditional forms of
power, and that is the dominant cost.

The positive publicity benefits of the decision likely outweigh any
extra financial burden, he added.



“Any telecom company can do what we've done,” Lindsay said.
“It's not as big a challenge as it looks. It comes down to the
fundamental question – do the shareholders of the business care more
about the dividend this year, or about the long-term impact of people
on the planet?”

NCAR's new data center - an embarrassment to the climate community

http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/nwsc/

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and its managing organization, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), is building a new supercomputing center in Wyoming. The current NCAR data center in Mesa has outgrown the facility's capacity, and a new facility that can accommodate future expansion is needed. The Wyoming facility will contain some of the world's most powerful supercomputers dedicated to improving scientific understanding of climate change, severe weather, air quality, and other vital atmospheric science and geoscience topics. The center will also house a premier data storage and archival facility that holds irreplaceable historical climate records and other information.

NCAR is probably the world’s premier research facility for undertaking climate modeling and research. So it is very bizarre that such an organization would undertake to build a new data center in a state where almost 100% of the electricity comes from coal fired generating plants. What is ever more outrageous is that one of the principal partners in the project, Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power is leading a campaign to stop cap and trade - http://www.cheyennelight.com/cap-and-trade/.

NCAR’s strategy to build a data center in Wyoming also highlights the ridiculousness and absurdity of claims to build an energy efficient data center with a low PUE in a LEED qualified building. These claims are meaningless when all of the electricity is coal generated. If NCAR was genuinely concerned about the environment a much smarter move would have been to locate the data center a few hundred kilometers west to Idaho where almost of the electricity is generated from hydro. Relocating to Idaho would do more for the environment than even the most stringent energy efficiency and LEED qualified buildings. It would also send an important message that new jobs and business opportunities are only going to occur in those jurisdictions that provide clean, renewable energy.

I suspect NCAR is being seduced to locate its new data center in Wyoming because of the low price of electricity that comes from coal fired plants. But that strategy may backfire on them as Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power claims that their electricity prices will increase 73% with cap and trade.

[This is a very significant announcement for universities and businesses in Europe. Europe has been well ahead of the rest of the world in implementing solutions to address climate change. As such I think they will be well positioned to be the big winners as we move to a low carbon economy. As mentioned in the article buildings are responsible for 36% of Europe’s GHG emissions. And according to several studies ICT represents 30-40% of the energy consumption in a typical office building. For universities ICT may represent 50% of the electrical consumption in a typical research facility. More astounding, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) the aggregate electrical consumption of ICT in many homes is now greater than the aggregate consumption of traditional appliances such as fridges, stoves, etc. We desperately need new solution to address the impact of ICT in our buildings such as using 400/60 Hz multiplexed power systems over existing copper wire, where the 400Hz power is reserved for small scale renewable power to drive low power ICT equipment. Excerpts from NY Times – BSA]

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/11/18/18greenwire-eu-to-mandate-nearly-zero-power-use-by-buildin-59814.html

E.U. to Mandate 'Nearly Zero' Power Use by Buildings

Most significantly, the European Union directive will require that nearly all buildings, including large houses, constructed after 2020 include stark efficiency improvements or generate most of their energy from renewable sources, coming close to "nearly zero" energy use.

European countries will also be required to establish a certification system to measure buildings' energy efficiency. These certificates will be required for any new construction or buildings that are sold or rented to new tenants. Existing buildings will also have to, during any major renovation, improve their efficiency if at all feasible.

Buildings are responsible for about 36 percent of Europe's greenhouse gas emissions, and stricter efficiency requirements have been sought for the past several years as absolutely necessary for the bloc to meets its goal of cutting emissions 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Other regions should take note, said Andris Piebalgs, the E.U. energy commissioner, in a statement.

"By this agreement, the E.U. is sending a strong message to the forthcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen," Piebalgs said. "Improving the energy performance of buildings is a cost effective way of fighting against climate change and improving energy security, while also boosting the building sector and the E.U. economy as a whole."

Gartner Says More Than 30 Percent of ICT Energy Use Is Generated by PCs and Associated Peripherals,"
Gartner news release, April 20, 2009,
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=941912

Electricity consumption by consumer electronics exceeds that of traditional appliances in many homes
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2009/05/electricity-consumption-by-consumer.html

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists
http://bit.ly/4CPppP

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists - Climate Change, Environment -

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ...

http://www.facebook.com/#/notes/laina-raveendran-greene/small-windpower-can-make-a-difference-in-remote-telecom-facilities/186185043115
[..]
Small Windpower Can Make a Difference in Remote Telecom Facilities
Share
Yesterday at 7:12pm

In the spirit of James Burke, it is always fun to follow the leads and find the connections. In this case, we start with a USA Today article “Wind backs up Honolulu airport power.” Hawaii and clean tech are one of my personal interest. The crux of the story is how the Hawaii Department of Transportation (DOT) has supplemented the power consumed with 16 small 1 Kw wind turbines. Nothing remarkable about a 16 Kw system. 16 Kw would be fine to offset daily power use for a utility building (in this case, the backup power for the Honolulu airport). How these small turbines were mounted drew in my attention.

The system is a state Department of Transportation pilot project and data is being gathered to determine the system's cost savings and energy output. It was installed at the end of June and cost about $100,000. Photos by RICHARD AMBO | The Honolulu Advertiser

We’ve seen many different wind systems which take advantage of the building’s real estate. But, the leading roof top edge has interesting aerodynamic benefits. Buildings have interesting aerodynamic effects. It is a whole specialty realm of engineering which is currently focused on physical stress loads on the build’s structure.

AeroVironment, the makers of the small, modular wind turbine installed at Honolulu’s Airport is on to something which would have significant impact to the way we look at structures. AreoVironment is a revolutionary aviation company. They understand aerodynamics from a flight perspective. Yet, with their Architectural Wind Services, they are applying that knowledge to leverage “the natural acceleration in wind speed resulting from the building’s aerodynamic properties. This accelerated wind speed can increase the turbines’ electrical power generation by more than 50% compared to the power generation that would result from systems situated outside of the acceleration zone.” Imaging what would happen if the expertise from AeroVironment was synergized with a company like Force Technologies? What could be gained by mindfully designing a building to capitalized the natural wind dynamics and use the changes the build acts on those dynamics to recoup energy?

As a minimum today, we can see telecoms buildings in remote rual areas use AeroVironment’s small wind technology to cost effectively offset power utilization. The price range for 12 units range at list between $134,000 to $180,000. In most areas of the US country with commercial electrical rates, that would be a ~5 year payback for the investment. Given that most telecommunications facilities have lifecycles which last decades, this is an interesting investment in energy offsets. Move this to a developing country installation, where you have higher electricity rate, fuel cost (generators), and unpredictable power, and the attractiveness increases. Then add the utilization of space. AeroVironment’s installation on the building does not interfere with other roof mounted solar installations or pole/antenna mounted wind systems. So this specific design can be used as a local power producing suite – offsetting the electrical cost of the telecommunications facility while opening the door for feed-in tariffs for any excess (if there are feed-in tariffs).

For more information on this item please visit my blog at
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------

[Doug Alder of Rackforce has put together an excellent in-depth analysis of the impact that cap and trade (with carbon at $20/tone) will have on web and computer servers that are located in jurisdictions that are dependent on coal based power. While the pending cap and trade bills in the US Congress will mitigate most of the costs for consumers, industry and institutions will not be similarly protected. The EPA estimates that cap and trade will raise the cost of electricity for these organizations by an “average” of 60% with significantly higher prices in states dependent on coal powered electricity . To put this in context, cap and trade will cost an organization at least an additional $65 -$150 per year per server (200 W) if those servers are located in a coal powered state or province versus a state or province that is powered by renewable energy such as hydro-electricity. Considering that most businesses and universities have thousands of servers, the aggregate bill could be gigantic. Some excerpts from his excellent blog-- BSA

http://www.thealders.net/blogs/2009/11/22/power-sources-and-their-coming-importance-to-your-business/

Power Sources and Their Coming Importance To Your Business
Do you have your own website? If you do it’s hosted on a server. Do you know where that server is located? Do you know the type of carbon footprint that server has where it is hosted? Do you care? If you do pay attention and you’ll learn something.
.
If we look at energy, first we will see how the source of that energy is important when considering the carbon footprint of a data center.

Let’s look at an example of two data centers, one in West Virginia and the other in British Columbia. Based on the data from Stats Canada, Environment Canada, & US Department of Energy that I researched I was able to build a spreadsheet showing the likely carbon cost for operating a server in each province and state (click on image for a readable version)(terms: gCO2eq/Kwh= grams of CO2 equivalent per Kilowatt hour, mTCO2eq/Mwh = grams CO2 equivalent per Megawatt hour, PUE = Power Usage Effectiveness a way of measuring how efficiently a data center uses the incoming power, that is what is the ratio of power used by the data center to the amount of power required to operate the ICT [Infornation Communications Technology] equipment (servers, switches, routers) – 1:1 would be perfect but basically impossible)

Now let’s see what that could mean to your business.

Say each data center is 120,000 sq. ft. raised floor (not at all unusual) Now allow a standard 32 sq. ft. per cabinet. That would give you a maximum number of 3125 racks (120,000/32) and each rack can hold a maximum of 42u worth of gear (a standard rack) but some of that will be the power distribution units of the data center and likely some of their networking gear too, so in general you will get around 36u of usable space. Assume you put 36 1u 200W servers in those slots. That gives you 112,500 servers in those 3125 racks. In BC, each of those servers would cost you an additional $1.06 per year. In West Virginia that would be $65.72 extra per server (the actual results would be higher though as a 120K sq. ft. data center would use up at least 20% of that space on aisles and various components needed to run a data center.) which, translates to $2365.92 instead of $38.16per rack per year extra. How will you justify that extra $2327.76 per rack per year to your shareholders?

The calculations above though were theoretical. They were based on a data center with perfect utilization of energy. That is for every watt of power required to run the ITC equipment in that data center they only used 1 watt of incoming power. Sadly, that is not the case and the average data center today has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 2.5 (and many are much worse – that is an average). That means they need to purchase 2.5 watts of power for every watt they sell to their customers. Now go back to the last paragraph and multiply those final numbers by 2.5. Your extra cost is now $4654.52 per rack.

If your company is a public company then, as carbon taxes and/or carbon Cap &Trade becomes legislated then you will have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to seek out the option that has you paying the least amount of taxes in order to maximize your returns. If you are a private company then you still need to consider the source of what powers your servers lest your competition beats you to it and gets a substantial edge in costs over you.

http://www.greenm3.com/2009/11/green-it-conferences-for-research-community.html

Green IT Conferences for research community

Thanks to Jordi Torres, Barcelona Supercomputing Center for sending a link to http://www.greenit-conferences.org/.

New web page for Green Computing research community

A group of outstanding researchers has set up a simple new web page to make it easier for research community find updated information about the emerging conferences in Green Computing, the next wave in computing.

The www.greenIT-conferences.org site, includes a list of research conferences focused on green computing and energy-aware computer and network technologies. The site has been designed to make it easier for researchers for find information about new conferences (and conference tracks) in the area. Hopefully the page will serve to improve research in this important area.

[Forward looking data center companies like Other World Computing
understand that data cneters are quickly becoming the new "heavy
industry" of the information age. If the Gartner forecast of 650%
growth become true we need to find alternative zero carbon solutions
for data centers and networks. CANARIE's recent annoucemnt
(http://www.canarie.ca/templates/news/releases/Green_IT_Nov17_2009_E.pdf)
to fund Greenstar (www.greenstarnetwork.com) is a good example of this
apporach. Greenstar network is a university-industry partnership
involing companies like CISCO and Ericsson to build worlds first zero
carbon Internet to enable the deployment of follow the wind/follow the
sun data networking. -- BSA]

On-Site WInd Power Provides 100% of Power to Data Center

http://ecogeek.org/wind-power/3009-on-site-wind-power-provides-100-of-power-to-data-c?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EcoGeek+%28EcoGeek%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

We've heard of data centers that are running on green power, though
these are often mostly done through buying energy credits for distant
generating facilities. But Woodstock, IL-based Other World Computing
is the first to have 100% on-site wind power to run its operations.
The 39 meter (128 foot) diameter, 500 kW turbine is expected to
generate an estimated 1,250,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. This is
more than twice as much electricity as is used by all of OWC's
operations. The facility is grid-tied, and will sell the excess power
back to the local utility, as well as being able to utilize grid power
as backup during slack wind periods.

Top data center challenges include social networks, rising energy
costs

Data growth will hit 650% over next half-decade, Gartner says

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/120109-data-center-challenges.html

Enterprise data needs will grow a staggering 650% over the next five
years, and that's just one of numerous challenges IT leaders have to
start preparing for today, analysts said as the annual Gartner Data
Center Conference kicked off in Las Vegas Tuesday morning.

Rising use of social networks, rising energy costs and a need to
understand new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing
are among the top issues IT leaders face in the evolving data center,
Gartner analyst David Cappuccio said in an opening keynote address.

The energy cost of two racks of servers, at full density, can exceed
$105,000 a year, he said. And servers are only growing denser, with
new blades that incorporate servers, storage, switches, memory and I/O
capabilities. At today's prices, the money spent on supplying energy
to an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server within three
years, he said

**Universities Challenged to Develop Technology Solutions for a
Carbon-Constrained World**

http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1626

Calit2 and CANARIE See Campuses as Living Labs for a Greener Future

[These 2 projects are very significant as now we are starting to see some quantifiable standards in order to measure the claims of CO2 abatement through ICT. As you know there are many studies claiming significant reduction of CO2 through ICT - but up to now there has been no independent process to validate these claims. Various energy efficiency schemes are probably the most egregious example of these types of hand waving arguments. While energy efficiency may reduce costs it is very ineffective tool for reducing CO2 emissions as compared to purchasing renewable energy credits or sourcing renewable energy directly. If you are interested in the following opportunities, please contact David Wright or Tony Vetter directly as listed below. Thanks to Bill Munson from ITAC for these pointers -- BSA



----- Forwarded by Bill Munson/ITAC/CA on 08/12/2009 17:33 -----


OPPORTUNITY TO TEST DRIVE EMERGING STANDARDS FOR GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
(a) Product Life Cycle GHG Costs
(b) Supply Chain GHG Costs


The World Resources Institute and the World Business Council on Sustainable
Development have developed standards on how to implement ISO 14064 for
companies and for projects, which have become widely used, particularly in
countries implementing the Kyoto Protocol.

They have now developed 2 new (draft) standards for Greenhouse Gas (GHG)
Accounting for (a) Product Life Cycle GHG Costs and (b) Supply Chain GHG
Costs. They are looking for companies to test-drive their draft standards
with a view to providing feedback on how the drafts can be updated to
provide a final standard. They are particularly interested in
sector-specific information and the ICT sector is a of great importance in
this area, because of its potential to impact GHG emissions both positively
and negatively.
http://www.ghgprotocol.org/standards/product-and-supply-chain-standard

Professor David Wright ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) at the University of Ottawa is
able to work with a company on this project. A rough division of
responsibilities would be that the company would assess its GHG emissions,
and Dr Wright would assess the impact on the draft standard.
http://www.telfer.uottawa.ca/component/listing,Wright,%20David/option,com_directory/page,viewListing/lid,111/Itemid,116/lang,En/




Shown below is a proposal from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, whois seeking support from ICT industry partners
for their CANARIE study. The key contact is their Project Manager, Global Connectivity, Tony Vetter, he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 613-288-2024.

ICT network operators and equipment vendors are looking to a variety of
solutions to reduce the GHG footprint of the world's ICT infrastructure.
Efficiency in how data centres consume energy may be part of the solution;
however using renewable energy is another “zero-carbon” option. CANARIE
Inc. invited proposals to their Green IT Pilot Program for projects that
will accelerate the development of, and participation in, national and
international "zero-carbon" cyber infrastructure and network platforms.

CANARIE has awarded funding to IISD for a project to assess the business
case for moving University IT assets to remote, zero-carbon data centre
facilities. Central to the business case will be an examination of whether
Universities could qualify for tradable “carbon offsets” (credits for GHG
reductions achieved which can be sold to industries who need them), a
revenue opportunity which could help underwrite the costs associated with
relocating their IT assets.

We think this project will be of interest to CIOs of all large
organizations because moving IT assets to zero-carbon facilities has not
previously been considered for generating carbon offsets. Further, there
may be other unexpected barriers to relocation of IT assets that could be
resolved through appropriate policy interventions, including jurisdictional
barriers arising from data security policies and capital financing rules,
and challenges associated with the availability of national
telecommunications infrastructure. These will also be explored through this
project.

Rational:
Due to the nature of how carbon credit awarding mechanisms are evolving,
IT organizations may in the end not be able to benefit from the carbon
reductions that their IT initiatives could help realize. This is due to
the concept of “additionality” – whether a project is deemed likely to
have occurred anyway without the support of revenues generated by
selling carbon offset credits.
This project’s assessment could open the door to broader acceptance of
IT asset relocation as a carbon reduction activity that should be
supported through carbon offset financial instruments.
Revenue opportunities from carbon credit trading could accelerate the
development of national and international "zero-carbon" cyber
infrastructure.

The tasks of this project will be to:
estimate depending on data availability, the aggregate carbon footprint
of IT assets and associated data centres at three Canadian Universities
assess the feasibility for Universities to generate carbon offsets if
their IT departments were to move location agnostic IT assets to remote
data centre facilities powered by renewable sources of energy
assess the feasibility of quantifying and selling these offsets in
registries and carbon exchanges;
assess the business case for University IT departments to move IT assets
to remote, zero-carbon data centre facilities, with attention to the
role of offset revenues if accessible to the relevant business unit;
assess the implications of study findings for scaling similar IT asset
relocation schemes for government agencies and institutions, as well as
the private sector


Anticipated insights:
characterization of the carbon incentives or disincentives to scaling
the relocation of IT assets to zero-carbon facility initiatives
long term implications of University IT asset growth projections and
associated carbon penalties
characterization of organizational boundaries encountered in carbon
accounting processes for facilities expenditures, energy consumption and
GHG emissions
characterization of jurisdictional barriers resulting from data security
policies and capital financing rules to the migration of University,
other public sector, and private sector IT infrastructure and services
characterization of the adequacy of National broadband infrastructure
for supporting cost effective access for remote relocation of IT
infrastructure and services



We believe that some ICT companies may be interested helping to determine
whether relocating IT assets to zero-carbon facilities might qualify for
tradable “carbon credits” in the emerging regimes, as well as in the
identification of other barriers and policy gaps that would impede the
feasibility of such initiatives.


--------------
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