CO2 footprint
Japan Power Grid crisis: countdown for shutdown
Hokkaido Electric Power Company has started with the shut down of reactor N0. 3 of the Tomari atomic power plant. By Sunday, the unit of 912 MW will officially come offline. Although the shut down is due for its regular maintenance checkup this is a dramatic event for Japan. It is the last of Japan’s [...]
Energy efficient Data Center ≠ Green Data Center
“Many IT companies are simply choosing to attach their modern information factories to some of the dirtiest sources of electricity, supplied by some of the dirtiest utilities on the planet” says Greenpeace. In their latest report ‘How green is your cloud?’, Greenpeace has criticized the cloud computing industry saying that cloud providers “are all rapidly expanding without [...]
Power grid crisis: Japanese data centers hit again?
It looks like the feared scenario of last year, that all of Japan’s nuclear power plants would be offline within about one year, is becoming true. Currently only two of 54 reactors are still operating. Tokyo Electric’s last active reactor is set to go into maintenance on March 26, while Hokkaido Electric’s Tomari No. 3 [...]
Data Centers and Mount Sustainability
This year Ray Anderson, often called the “greenest CEO in America” has passed away. Mr. Anderson was the founder of Interface, one of the world’s largest producer of commercial carpet tiles. After 20 years, running his business in compliance with government regulations, he read in 1994 Paul Hawken’s book “The Ecology of Commerce,” which gave [...]
Impact Australian roll out carbon tax on IT
This week the Australian parliament passed the Clean Energy bill, 2011 – the effect of which will be to introduce a carbon tax starting in July of 2012 as explained in the GreenMonk blog . The tax will start at 17 euro per tonne in 2012-2013 and will increase to 24.15 euro in 2013-2014 and 25.40 euro [...]
Iceland green data center initiatives
Data center operators want to cut energy usage and energy costs. The Nordic countries, with their cool temperatures, cool water and an electricity generation that is nearly entirely from renewable sources are starting all kinds of initiatives to answer this needs. In an experimental phase we have the tidal power generation at the Orkney Islands, in [...]
Data centers, reducing energy usage by heating and distribution
In delivering computer process power and storage capacity there are apparently two opposite approaches, the cloud computing mega data center “bigger is better” and the local nano data center “small is beautiful”. The current “bigger is better” model of cloud computing leads, although shifted from customer to supplier, still to enormous capital expenditures, problems in [...]
The Greening of IT: Successes, Failures, and the Future?
The Uptime Institute uploaded an interesting discussion. It is the keynote panel discussion from Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, were George Goodman (Climate Savers Computing Initiative), Jon Haas (The Green Grid), KC Mares (Silicon Valley Leadership Group), Bruce Myatt (Critical Facilities Round Table), and Pitt Turner (Uptime Institute) join Andy Lawrence (The 451 Group) to discuss [...]
Transparency of carbon footprint cloud computing
IT services are delivered as a black box from the cloud making carbon footprint assessment difficult. Now the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is coming with a usage model that is designed to ensure organizations can predict CO2 emissions and track actual emissions through technical capabilities instituted by providers of cloud services. This model must [...]
Greener IT Can Form a Solid Base For a Low-Carbon Society
Precisely a year a go we launched the book Greening IT in print and online (free to download). And if I may say so, the book is still worth the effort of reading. The book aims at promoting awareness of the potential of Greening IT, such as Smart Grid, Cloud Computing, Thin Clients and Greening [...]
