How Green Technology will weather the post copenhagen slump - By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Apr 5 2010)

1. 

   A new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit makes depressing reading, if you are relying on public opinion to sweep through the kind of efficiency improvements we will need to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets. It seems that people just don't believe in it any more. 

   The survey was done just before Christmas so people's belief in climate change had just suffered a triple-whammy. The Climategate email leak dented people's trust in the science, even though the enquiries look like clearing the scientists of everything except responding slowly to information requests. The Copenhagen summit - partly due to the Climategate affair - was a washout, and that convinced people that world leaders don't really care. And finally, the Northern hemisphere had a cold winter. Perfectly explainable in climate science terms, but many people have been happy to leap to the conclusion that... well, maybe there ain't no global warming after all. 

   Myself, I think that's wishful thinking. The action of greenhouse gases is well understood - up to now, it's been the usual explanation for how come the planet is warm enough for us to live on.  And the increase of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is pretty well documented from reliable sources. Those facts would lead to a prediction of temperature rises, which - take a long enough base line and don't confuse weather with climate - are also there. 

   In any case, public opinion matters not one jot. The data centre world is living through a period where medium term regulations will push us towards greater efficiency and long term energy costs make it a necessity. 

   The UK has a spanking-new emissions trading scheme, which started on 1 April, and is intended to encourage people to operate more efficiently, but it looks increasingly as if the US won't have a similar system, and full blown "cap and trade" may be killed there by scepticism and indifference. Whether you think that is good or bad depends on whether you believe in emissions trading. With or without it, servers and storage you buy this year will start to have Energy Star ratings, and your strategy will require them. 

   In the longer term, the good news is that green technology is pretty much embedded in the minds of governments and the business world. The UK government budget for this yearbacks green energy, and green tech, of one form or another, is now the leading category of firms getting venture capital funding. That might turn out to be a bubble, with a lot of spurious technologies getting backing, as those with money throw caution to the winds. 

   For instance, Bloom Energy, the makers of the apparently revolutionary fuel cell system we've covered here, is arousing suspicions among people who are used to kicking the tyres of dodgy technologies. Could it be that - even though venture funding is not so easy to get this time round - we may be seeing a little of the same sort of bubble as happened in the dot-com fiasco before 2000?

   However that turns out, there's always going to be a buck to be made in doing things more efficiently, and helping others to do likewise. And nothing will stop human inventiveness - as we saw a couple of weeks ago, there are still more ways to cool a server being discovered, and there will be still more to come in future. 

   Whatever public opinion says, greener, leaner and more efficient servers are the way of the future. 

   
   

   
   

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