Green IT solutuions: energy efficiency versus purchasing renewable power?

[Once again we are seeing several reports that energy efficiency is the way to reduce to the carbon footprint of IT, computing, cyber-infrastructure and other energy consuming activities. While energy efficiency is meritorious it will only have token impact on reducing the carbon footprint, especially that of IT. The continued growth in demand for new services and applications will quickly outpace many of the gains of energy efficiency, which because of all the legacy equipment amounts to only a few percent per year. If an individual or organization is truly and genuinely concerned about the environment and reducing their carbon footprint purchasing RECs (renewable energy credits) or renewable energy resale from a reputable ESCO is a much more direct and guaranteed way of becoming zero carbon. All the energy efficiency claims in the world will never be able to come close to reducing your carbon footprint as much or as quickly as purchasing renewable power. And better still as your demand for IT and cyber-infrastructure grows, as it inevitably will, you can still maintain a zero footprint if all your energy comes through RECs.

Of course, the big problem with RECs, or renewable energy resale is its cost. It can be substantially more expensive than dirty power. So purchasing RECs is really an indicator of an IT organization’s true commitment to becoming green. An alternative approach is to acquire your own renewable power is by building windmills on site or relocating IT equipment to a renewable energy sites. For example ecotricity (www.ecotricity.uk) in the UK has a novel business plan where they will build a windmill at a data center at their cost, in return for a long term contract for the power delivered from the windmill. Other organizations such as MIT and UoMassachusetts are looking to relocate their computing and cyber-infrastructure equipment to remote data centers powered by local hydro electric dams and/or windmills. The challenge with this scenario is the reliability of power. How can you build a reliable IT infrastructure when you have intermittent power sources such as wind mills, solar panels, etc? This is where clouds, grids and virtualization connected with high speed networks can play a critical role. Computing and data jobs can quickly be moved from site to site depending on the availability of local renewable power. This is the essence of CANARIE’s Green IT program. And as illustrated by the recent paper from researchers at MIT and CMU can save up to 40% on energy costs alone.

Even for consumers, using renewable power can be much simpler way of reducing their footprint than through buying energy efficient devices. According to the IEA, consumer IT devices use more power in aggregate than all traditional appliances combined in many homes. A lot of this power consumption is taken up by “vampire” loads when devices are in standby mode such as wall chargers, TVs, set top boxes, etc. A simple solution would be for the consumer to install a small solar panel and/or wind turbine and power all these vampire loads with a “multiplexed power” system using the existing household copper wiring. A vampire power network could use something like a 400 Hz power frequency which would be filtered out by traditional AC devices but could easily power appropriately modified AC/DC converters, chargers, switching power supplies, etc – BSA]


[ IMHO some misleading examples of comments on energy efficiency]

Google policy blog: The vast potential of energy efficiency
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/08/vast-potential-of-energy-efficiency.html

international Science Grid Week
How Green is my Grid
http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001940