Lessons from the carbon credit fraud - By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jan 24 2011)

1. 

   Last week, the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) had to be closed down at least for a week, because of massive and persistent fraud. To which the only sensible response is “You don’t say!”

   It’s a development which adds somewhat to the gloom I feel from Doug Mohney’s comments that data center efficiency isn’t enough to change things. Could it be that no matter what we do, the system is simply not working?

   In a few weeks’ time, I’m chairing another webinar that hopes to get to the bottom of how data centre owners should respond to the changing landscape of emissions control regulations - and in particular the UK’s CRC. .

   Starting from the basics, there is a looming energy crisis. In the UK, we will have it particularly bad, because many of our coal fired power stations are due to shut by 2016 to meet European rules, and most of our nuclear plants will reach the end of their lives by then. 

   Globally, the big picture is an increase in the price of fossil energy. Other forms of power - including nuclear and renewables - are struggling to fill the gap. Efficiency measures may actually be cheaper, but they are hard to fund and organise. And meanwhile the developing world still intends to develop fast, rather than hobble itself with limits to consumption.

   To ease the transition from peak oil, governments have a few tools in their pockets. At the simplest, these boil down to measures that ease the price of fossil energy up quicker. This makes the responses (efficiency, and alternative energy) more attractive sooner - before they are essential and it is already too late to do them.

   As Doug says, we need more renewable energy “like yesterday”.  

   In the long run, members of the UK parliament (a specialist Peak Oil committee) are considering fuel rationing for individuals. We also have the CRC scheme, which has emerged into a fairly basic energy tax on large organisations. .

   At the European level, we have this carbon exchange, which has been repeatedly defrauded, and is now closed at least till Wednesday. Which illustrates the problem with carbon credits: if you create a new form of currency, you will inevitably create opportunities for fraud.

   The lesson from the ETS’s problems may be that things should be kept simple. When it looked like there was plenty of time, and we still had money to spend on this, we saw over-complex ideas like the original CRC scheme, which combined a competitive element, and “carrots” - incentives for those using less energy.

   Over-complex government schemes just increase the possibility of fraud. 

   I don’t want to pre-empt the discussion in my webinar, but I suspect the message for data centre owners may be similar - keep things simple.

   In the light of new rules, people running data sites should examine their contracts. One simple-minded response might be to offload the centre, to a third party. They pay the energy taxes, you don’t. And if they are more specialised in running data centres than you are, they may get a better margin than you would. .

   If you are keeping hold of the site, you should definitely look into on-site generation. There are very good reasons (to do with transmission losses, which I can go into another time) that mean that even fossil fuel generation is better done locally.

   Finally, there is still the hardware. Look at refreshing it, and look at simple-minded stuff like blanking plates, to separate your cold and hot aisles. And look at changing your cooling.

   And finally, what about checking on the actual IT workload? As Doug  says, Intel sees a continued boom in chips for servers, which are going into a massive global build of data centres.

   How efficiently are the processer cycles actually being used, and how much of the processing is useful?

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