Category: Carbon Tax

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.

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.

While data centres and Cloud computing are not new kinds of technology, they did generate plenty of stories during 2011 as operators began to turn fresh ground for new data centre sites while been faced with the Gillard Government’s incoming carbon tax. Cloud has made the headlines as more Australian companies decide to outsource data and cut costs by putting services such as email into the Cloud. Out of all the local data centre operators, Melbourne-based NextDC (ASX: NXT) seemed to be constantly in the headlines as they announced plans for sites in Sydney (S1), Brisbane (B1), Canberra and Perth.

Australia’s Federal Government said it will consider making data centers in the country exempt from its new carbon tax, passed as the Clean Energy Bill 2011 in October this year and due to come in place with Senate approval, if such a move is needed to keep data center activity onshore. In a report by The Australian last month, a spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the government was monitoring the impact of the tax on the sector, and especially the impact the carbon tax could have on the burgeoning cloud computing market. He did say no exemption was being considered at the moment, but it was looking into reports that a number of companies had reconsidered plans to spend millions on new data centers, instead opting to move cloud operations offshore.

The increasing demand for power and its cost have emerged as primary concerns for Indian IT organizations, driving them to take a closer look at the efficiencies of their data centers and IT infrastructure. With data centers being the primary contributor to energy costs, the need to reduce power consumption within it has been a recurring theme across organizations. When it comes to increasing power efficiencies, one needs to understand the cost of running and managing the data center as well as the environmental costs associated with it in order to deploy appropriate technological solutions. About 50 per cent of the energy costs in data centers go into heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), power conditioning and distribution. The rest is spent on servers, storage, and network equipment.

The details of the Carbon Tax have finally been revealed and everyone wants to know how it will affect them. The IT industry is no exception and questions arise as to the likely impact on data centres, Cloud usage and even green IT initiatives in general. Although the government says that there will only be about 500 companies that pay the carbon tax, we will all end up paying it indirectly, as the added costs to these companies gets passed along the supply chain. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to predict with much certainty what the actual pricing impact will be. However, it would be reasonable to assume that some broad based corrections will occur as a result of the new tax, which will include the IT sector.

A number of enterprise data centers built over the past five years have gained attention because they are considered ‘green’. You only have to look at Facebook, Google and Yahoo!, all of which are using innovative and environmentally friendly cooling, building on brownfield sites and investing in renewable energy. And over the past two years colocation players have also started to make green headlines. Capgemini opened its Merlin data center inthe UK last year with an expected PUE of 1.1. Telecity opened its Condorcet data center in Paris, which sends heat into an arboretum being used to predict the effects of climate change. EvoSwitch opened a data center in Amsterdam promising a low carbon footprint, and a number of new entrants, including Verne Global (which announced what is supposed to be one of the 'greenest' data centers in the world just this week) and Deep Green, are building out ...

The IndypendentWhat it Will Take to Make Renewable Energy a Reality in the USThe IndypendentStill, its main initiative on global warming has been an unsuccessful attempt to enact a “cap and trade” system–essentially, “in exchange for being allowed to operate a coal-fired power plant in Tennessee, we'll buy a forest in Brazil and not cut it ...and more »

Only 1 per cent of Australian CIOs see or pay for their electricity bills – even though ICT represents up to 75 per cent of energy usage in some organisations. And although Australia initially started well in the sustainability stakes, it’s now slumped, and is the worst in the world when it comes to end user sustainability. Related Articles Westpac tech tsar blasts portability plan New research sifts cloud’s best from the rest Australia drops the ball on green IT Green gong goes to power utility’s data centre Green IT delivers cost savings: report With electricity prices already on the march and further rises likely as a result of the Government’s proposed carbon tax, many organisations will in the future experience energy bill shock. But unless they reform the way in which electricity charges are apportioned, there won’t be much incentive for IT managers to get ...

Since the Kyoto Protocol was developed in 1997, an unlikely new global partnership of bankers and environmentalists has emerged. I call it the Carbon Coalition, and while it seems like a very 21st century development, I actually trace its emergence back to the arrival of Reaganism in the 1980s. Under Ronald Reagan, Americans began to see the market itself as a potential tool of government, something politicans could work with, rather than simply against (on the left) or for (on the right). With this shift, Reagan made it possible for Democrats, and their traditional constituencies, to change: It's safe to say that it was Reagan who begat Bill Clinton, who then begat Tony Blair. For better or worse, the political right, through success, made the left become more attendant to the values of market capitalism. This affected everyone in the Democrats' tent, including environmentalists.

Consistent with the wider data centre sector’s focus on reducing carbon emissions — a trend given yet more impetus by the carbon tax — PMDCs are also being ... such as the use of free cooling. “The way it works is that when the outside air in ...

One organisation literally banking on the notion that data centre space in CBDs will continue to be at a premium is Verb IT, which has partnered with HP for its version of the PMDC, the Performance-Optimised Datacentre or POD.

Exactly what affect could a carbon tax have on Australia’s data center industry? We spoke to one market expert to find out. Australia introduced its carbon tax this week, which from July next year will see its top 500 polluters pay AU$23 for each tonne of carbon emitted. There is little doubt that countries such as the UK, considering own version of a carbon tax – the CRC (Carbon Reduction Commitment) -will be interested to see how the move pans out. Few Australian data centers are expected to incur higher power costs but not the tax, however, and much of this comes down to its demographic as a data center market.

Australia introduces carbon taxDatacenterDynamicsSingapore Telecom (Optus), Telstra, IBM, Fujitsu and Vodafone are a part of this list but some companies, including Fujitsu, said energy efficiency measures put in action in recent years have saved it from the top 500 list. ...and more »

NextDC chief executive, Bevan Slattery, has predicted that it may be incurring costs of "2.7 cents per kilo watt" at its Melbourne facility once the Gillard Government's carbon tax comes into affect on 1 July, 2012. Speaking to Computerworld Australia, Slattery said the company's calculations show that the carbon tax will create further incentives for it and fellow data centre providers to pursue energy efficiency measures.