Global Warming: Will Data Centers Take a Back Seat Role? - By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 18 2011)

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   2009’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen was judged a failure. 2010’s return match in Cancun may have better results - but it seems clear that data centers won’t have the lead role in fighting global warming.

   The Cancun conference failed to get a legally binding deal to continue the Kyoto Protocol’s agreement to limit emissions, but it made several real steps, according to the UK’s secretary for energy and climate change, Chris Huhne, who thinks climate change efforts are actually still moving. .

   “Trade talks took decades,” he said at a House of Commons briefing last week. “We haven’t got decades but we should not be dispirited.“

   The Japanese still won’t sign up unless the Chinese do, and the US can’t make a big step with a Republican house of Representatives (don’t hold your breath waiting for carbon trading now). But for the first time the developing nations made a commitment to take part in efforts to avert climate change - and won a $100 billion adaptation fund for the changes required.

   And, after the ClimateGate fiasco a year ago, the science got itself together and came up with a figure - 2C - for how much temperature change we can stand.

   And Huhne thinks there are prospects for the big refusenik - China - actually coming on board. “China is the market leader in solar cells,” he said. “It has an interest in a legally binding climate change agreement because it has an interest in the low carbon future.”

   This low-carbon economy is an opportunity for everyone, said Huhne, and investment is going well, and the cost of photo-Voltaic electricity is going down at six percent per year. “PV will cross the cost curve of fossil fuels before too long.” 

   Admittedly, BP’s deal with Russia’s Rosneft to explore a new oil field in the Arctic shows there’s still a lot of investment in high-carbon energy - and given BP’s environmental record, should make us a little worried.

   But what about America? Well, although Federal efforts for carbon trading are now blocked, there are plenty of regional efforts going on, said Huhne, and he even thinks a Federal effort could happen, if it is sold to the Republicans as “some sort of Patriotic Energy Act” designed to provide energy security.

   And what, in the end, does this global energy politics have  to do with data centers? Talking to people after Huhne’s speech, I noticed there were very few pure IT people there.

   A year ago, I thought that , but now IT would be taking a more obviously central role in moves to reduce carbon use, through instrumentation and control. Data centers use about two percent of the world’s energy, but the work they do can be used to properly optimise the other 98 percent, so the argument goes from people like IBM and others. 

   But it turns out, in the global stage, isnot the star. .

   “Green IT was a fad, and it was killed by the 2009 recession,,” I was told by an analyst recently. Service companies aren’t interested in improving data centers in isolation - they want to take optimise whole companies, including transport, heating and other stuff.

   But of course, Green IT is not dead, and nor are green data centers - except as a rich market for analyst reports.

   Whatever else happens, energy costs will go up. And IT folks will carry on increasing the performance, and energy efficiency of data centers. I don’t think it will get huge kudos, but the work won’t happen unless that keeps happening. 

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