Third in a Series- “Lets Fix It!” In Part one, we provided an overview of how air travel can be made much more efficient without an exotic new plane. In Part two, the auto industry was the focus, and it was less about the car, and more about how efficiently it’s made. For part three, an equally important driver of the 21st century economy is the focus- Information Technology. To begin with a positive- Web access devices are becoming much less energy intensive. For example, the latest notebooks use draw only15-30 watts of power, and the newest tablets use only between 10-25 watts. It’s clear that, in contrast to the continued use of 100-400 watt desktop units, increased tablet and notebook use can make a difference in CO2 reduction.

Dean Nelson, who oversees data centers for eBay, told me recently that he has two big business problems to solve: I need control of power cost. How do I get a power hedge? As a growing business, we are consuming more power. Along with that, in parallel, I own 62% of the carbon footprint of the company. We love being in Utah, but Utah was our biggest problem because the electricity comes mostly from coal. Nelson and his boss, eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe, have just taken one big step towards solving both problems. The company announced today [June 21] that it will expand a data center in South Jordan, Utah, by acquiring fuel cells from Bloom Energy, a private company that already supplies fuel cells to eBay headquarters in San Jose [above]. The data-center installation will deliver six megawatts of energy. That’s a lot. eBay says the project ...