Category: Emissions

Leafing through the latest environmental news, we ran across six predictions for green IT in 2012. We like that sort of thing, predictions. What we really like is running across "Predictions for 2010" online, and having a good chuckle. Anyway, there it was, Prediction #1 for green IT in 2012: "Greenwashing is dead." Really. Do tell. Nobody invited us to the ecofuneral.

But can the fuel cell firm survive as subsidies fade? Earlier this week Adobe announced that it had added another 400 kilowatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells to its current fleet of Bloom Boxes. I spoke with Mike Bangs, Adobe's Director of Global Facilities, about the installation. The two 200-kilowatt units installed at the company's San Francisco site are Bloom's next-generation design and put out twice the

Colt, Europe's leading information delivery platform, has been awarded the Uptime Institute's Management & Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval for its London 3 site. Colt is the first data centre operator in Europe to be accredited, demonstrating its leadership in the industry.

Julian Kudritzki, Vice President at the Uptime Institute commented, "Colt's M&O approved London 3 site management not only deserves congratulations, but reinforces Colt's commitment to excellence in operations."

The Institute's M&O Stamp of Approval validates that Colt's facility satisfies industry-recognised criteria. This criteria is deemed essential to achieve full uptime potential, obtain maximum leverage of the installed infrastructure and design, improve the efficiency of operations and realise opportunities for energy efficiency.

Chances are the Internet has changed something about your life. How you shop. How you stay in touch with school buddies or look for a job.

But has it made you greener? And will using the Internet more change your wear and tear on the planet?

The short answer is that the Internet could save energy, if not necessarily Mother Earth.

The more interesting answer comes in a longer conversation short on absolutes and peppered with unintended consequences.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups - its service will make its debut in some neighborhoods this year - the change could be transformational.

We'll have access at home to Internet fast enough to download the city library's entire collection every minute. Speeds like that, Google hopes ...

The way large enterprises, government agencies and managed service providers analyze and utilize energy in their data centers will undergo some fairly substantial changes over the next five years. Some organizations are already struggling with increased power demands in the face of constrained capacity caused by both inefficient equipment and stranded power.  The situation is understandable, as most data centers were designed to emphasize performance and availability, with little attention paid to how efficiently the data center would deliver on those objectives.

“It is one thing to flirt with an idea, and another thing to be married to it.” –Freud In founding a new long-term, visionary world economy, there is no more apposite topic than sustainability — where we develop and establish a durable, value-generating business model delivering long-term protection of the global economy, society and natural capital. And in order to establish sustainability as a business model, organizations need to understand the interdependence between its various capitals – such as human capital, manufactured capital, etc. – and their impacts on energy, water, bio-diversity, green house gas emissions. They must also understand the wider societal impacts of sustainability, and define all of these into one coherent policy and reporting framework.

In Kansas City, perhaps as much as anywhere in America, that discussion of the how using the Internet will change your wear and tear the planet could become ever more profound. If Google Inc. succeeds with plans to blanket the market in lightning-fast Internet hookups the change could be transformational.

China's lead negotiator on climate change says the world's largest emitter is considering imposing a tax on carbon to reduce the use of dirty energy as its economy grows. Su Wei, on a visit to Washington, said that the fast-developing Asian power was looking at the impact of an outright tax on carbon and whether it would overlap with China's plans for a pilot scheme on carbon emissions trading. "I think the carbon tax is one of the instruments that can be used," Su Wei told reporters on Wednesday during a visit to the World Resources Institute, a think-tank.

Central to the design and management of data centers is the issue of energy efficiency. In the past, data centers were known for their excessive energy consumption and need for space. In fact, data centers produce about 2 percent of the global carbon emissions on an average, similar to that in the airline industry. This has led businesses to look for ways to reduce the level of energy consumed in data centers and adopt a smarter approach, while taking into account the detrimental impact data cen

Despite consuming only around 3-to-5 percent of a data center’s electrical load, lighting can make a greater impact on a data systems power usage effectiveness rating than many other efficiency systems, according to an article in the Data Center Journal. Switching to energy efficient lighting that integrates with building performance and energy management systems can improve a center’s PUE by up to 25 percent, the article says. The potential efficiency savings from lighting are so great that the publication has labeled it the “unsung hero” of data center efficiency.

The full story can be found here. 33: ABB to Supply DC Power Distribution System to Green Data Center ABB announced that it will design and install an advanced, dc power distribution system for green.ch, one of the top information and ...

Happy New Year to you all. If we had to have a new year’s resolution in the world of green energy and green data centers, I guess it would be to maintain some clarity over the difference between efficient energy use, and renewable energy supply. We all know that we must do something about climate change (at least, all of us except the most ignorant climate-change deniers). What that should be depends on whether you think that we can cut our energy use by changing our habits and being more efficient, or keep our lifestyles just the same and change the way we generate our electricity. Ideas like smart grids and low-energy data centers play towards the path of greater efficiency, while moves to use wind and solar power are heading towards changing our energy sources. Both are green - but if your argument jumps relies on both, or flips ...

A nice little report out telling us that going green isn't in fact going to cost us anything. Which is indeed nice as just about everyone else would just love to clean up the planet, reduce pollution and not boil Gaia but we have this sneaking suspicion that the costs of doing so are going to be greater than the benefits. So to hear that it won't cost anything is just glorious: miraculous in fact.

What’s up with Google and biomass power? By Katie Fehrenbacher Dec. 27, 2011, 12:46pm PT 4 Comments * Tweet * * * Out of all of Google’s close to $1 billion in clean power projects, turning biomass into energy seems like the least relevant technology to Google’s core business. But Google has made a few small investments into biofuels and biomass to energy projects including a venture investment into CoolPlanetBiofuels earlier this year, and one I learned about this week: a project that turns was

More importantly, Google has raised the bar for enabling other businesses to improve their energy efficiency. On the Google Green ... Singapore as well as the U.S. data center locations across seven states. How efficient are Google searches?