Good start — as we walked in and registered the staff handed me a recyclable, biodegradable, compostable lanyard.

The theme for this year’s conference - Sustainability in a Reset World

After admiring our lanyards and breakfast we jumped into packed conversation with Pamela Passman of Microsoft. Of course we considered today’s launch of Windows 7.

The discussion centered on the sustainability of Microsoft. Now, most people will admit that the technology business isn’t the least sustainable or “dirtiest” business. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t press a heavy carbon footprint. Passman discussed that companies need software to track their own carbon footprint.Microsoft may have many ideas for other comanies but they need to look in the mirror as well.

She admitted the two most pressing issues that Microsoft needs to improve in so far as reducing their carbon footprint that includes:

1- Traveling (lots of it)

2 – Data centers — The data centers continue to be electric and water intensive.
Microsoft claims to be attempting reduce the footprint of these data centers.

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Are you like millions of others who assume that an online business, just by virtue of being online, translates to having a lower carbon footprint?  If so, then you are in for a shock. Although this is a fairly common assumption, the truth is that internet powered businesses often have a higher energy consumption requirements than offline businesses and so might have a long way to go before they can become green.

And the situation looks like it could get worse over the next few years. Get this….

• According to the EPA, over the next five years, power failures and limits on availability will stop operations at more than 90% of data centers
• Gartner predicts that early 50% of data centers worldwide will have trouble finding the electricity they need to cool and power their computing equipment
• 97% of respondents in a new survey conducted by the Business Performance Management Forum (BPM) said that it was important for internet and e-commerce businesses to reduce their carbon footprint.

But despite this, very little action is being taken by online businesses to reduce energy consumption.

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With servers humming constantly and air conditioning systems keeping the climate at just the right temperature, data centers have some pretty steep power demands. Now the industry is promoting a new set of energy efficiency guidelines.

The Green Grid, a consortium of tech companies founded in 2007, launched the new guidelines at its second annual technical forum in San Jose Wednesday. The Green Grid calls it the Data Center 2.0 program, which it says will create a “multi-year set of design guides proposed for use by data center operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers.” The program will offer guidelines for newly built centers and renovations to existing ones, the group said.

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A major tidal power developer has confirmed it is in the early planning stages of developing an off-grid data center in Northern Scotland to be powered exclusively by tidal energy.

Atlantis Resources Corporation and Morgan Stanley said they are in the early stages of planning a tidal power project located in Scotland’s Pentland Firth, reports BBC Scotland. Pentland Firth separates the Orkney Islands from the Scottish mainland, and has huge potential tidal energy resources.

>>More on tidal power at CleanTechnica

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Data centers, the nerve centers for the computing world, use an estimated 2% of all energy used in the United States, and are also heavy users of water. At an AeA presentation I attended in May of this year, Microsoft’s Lewis Curtis shared the following:

• In 2006, U.S. data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 5.8 million U.S. households, costing companies $4.5 billion
• If this trend is unchecked, in 2011 data centers will use 100 billion kWh of energy at a cost of $7.4 billion, necessitating the building of 10 additional power plants

Attention has turned recently to how these centers can be made much more resource-efficient. Taking a leadership position in this effort is Advanced Data Centers (ADC) , who has just earned a LEED platinum certification for its data center in McClellan Park in Sacramento, California. ZDNet interviewed ADC’s Bob Seese on how the center achieved its LEED rating, summarized here:

• The center’s site has some of the lowest power costs in California
• ADC invested in its own electricity substation
• Rain water will be recaptured from roof runoff and used for landscaping, tower cooling, and some bathroom fixtures
• Outside air will be used for cooling 75 percent of the time — free
• 95 percent of construction debris will be recycled
• Non-toxic chemicals were used for finishes and adhesives
• Daylighting will be used for ambient lighting throughout the building.

Related Post: Cooling Data Centers Could Prevent Massive Electrical Waste

It is estimated that the data storage sector consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5% of total U.S. consumption, or roughly equivalent to the amount consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households). These numbers are only expected to grow.

The energy used by the nation’s servers and data centers is growing at an unsustainable rate. Not only that, but web servers are notoriously inefficient. For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities operate at roughly 65% to 75% efficiency, meaning that 25% to 35% of all the energy consumed by servers is wasted (converted to heat).

If we are to even consider reducing our energy consumption and carbon footprint, the growing demands generated by our web servers must be near the top of the list of possible improvements. And the Department of Energy agrees.

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Based on data from the Uptime Institute, a technology consulting company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the McKinsey report finds that, between 2000 and 2006, the amount of energy needed to power data centers doubled, and that consumption is likely to double again by 2012. In the U.S. alone, we would need to build 10 new power plants by 2010 just to meet the growing energy needs of this country’s data centers.

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Changes occur so rapidly in the world of technology that new problems — and new solutions — crop up every day. One of the most glaring problems for data centers right now is that their hundreds of servers stay on at full power all of the time. The simple, low-tech solution to this problem (namely, turning the servers OFF) turns out to really not be so simple after all.

In an article for SearchDataCenter.com, writer Bridget Botelho calls server shut downs (during holidays or off-hours) “the road not taken”. Facility operators interviewed for that article cite several reasons for keeping servers going at full capacity, among them fear of lost data and simple convenience. Some facilities also claim that it is hard to establish exactly when off-hours might be — after all, who can really predict demand for internet services?

Central to this issue seems to be the fact that people are just not confident of their ability to manually manage server operations. In response, entrepreneurs are developing — you guessed it — technological solutions, which reduce the human factor in this equation.

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Whether I am blogging or working for a more traditional media outlet, I can get almost any information I need simply by using the internet. So with a paperless home office, and no travel to speak of, just about the only ecological cost of doing business is the electricity that my computer uses… my computer, and, well, all of the servers that transport the e-mail, photos, and other data that I need.

How much electricity might that require, exactly? It turns out that our worldwide increase of internet-based data transmission relies upon a growing number of data centers, or Web server farms, as they are sometimes called. A single server farm consists of an enormous warehouse holding data storage systems and tens of thousands of smaller, state-of-the-art servers which process the information for all of our online activities. In recent years the construction of new data centers has increased dramatically, driven by the fact that most software applications will soon be delivered as online service products rather than via physical means (such as CD-ROMs). An article in Fortune magazine last year described the building boom of these server farms; a good single case study is the spate of data centers that have recently located along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

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It wasn’t so long ago that the biggest concern for webmasters was simply keeping their sites online and running properly. But with the double-whammy of rapidly-accelerating web hosting demands and climate change, a growing number of site operators are looking for ways to not only stay online but to stay online sustainably.

If you’ve never given much thought to the amount of energy it takes to power the Internet and all its sites and services, consider this: so many new Web servers went into operation between 2000 and 2005 that global data center energy consumption doubled during that time period. (While the growing popularity of lower-end servers increased per-unit energy consumption, most of the increased power demand came from a sheer growth in numbers of servers
— a study put the two growth rates at 5 to 8 percent and 90 percent, respectively.)

Fortunately, eco-minded webmasters are finding more hosting companies that are trying to do something to reduce their energy appetites, or at least offset the emissions their operations produce. VirtualHosting.com, an online resource for comparison-shopping virtual (shared-server) Web hosting providers, recently published a guide to hosts working to shrink their environmental footprints. "Green Hosting: 11 Carbon-Neutral Hosting Alternatives" provides a good overview to some green Web hosts in the U.S., U.K and Australia.

While some of the hosting companies (Rackspace or WebHostingBuzz, for example) plant trees or take other conservation measures to reduce their overall environmental impact, others are partially (Sustainable Hosting) or fully (Iron Mountain) powered by renewable sources. It’s interesting to see the different approaches taken by different companies, and encouraging to see that a growing number are at least trying to do something.

Another good starting point for those shopping for Earth-friendly Web services is Co-op America’s National Green Pages. A click on the Internet > Consulting/Services option takes you to information about 31 different green Internet service providers. You’ll find some of the same names described in the VirtualHosting.com article, but many others as well, including ThinkHost, which is fully powered by a mix of solar and wind energy.

It’s reassuring to know that, while the Internet and all its virtual bells and whistles require real-world energy, some Web companies are trying to lighten the load.

AC-DC?

For electricity flowing all the way from power plants to the wall socket, alternating current is far superior. But for the short transmissions inside those computers DC power prevails. The search for ways to convert AC to DC more efficiently is leading some data center companies to consider a DC-centric approach.

It’s easier to transmit AC over long distances; DC requires thick copper cables or bars, instead of comparatively lightweight wires. But DC becomes a more serious possibility for power once AC reaches a building.

Converting from one form of power to another in a computing environment may not be performed efficiently, especially at the server level, and even then, the resulting waste heat may be deposited in the rack or computer room at a point that requires further effort to dispose of it with the air handlers. Unfortunately, there is disagreement in the community over how to address these inefficiencies.

• DC advocates argue that plugging servers into AC power is inefficient, and switching systems to DC would cut down on waste heat and component failure.
• Proponents argue that using DC outside the server removes some of the inefficiencies of power supplies that convert AC electricity to DC. Servers without such power supplies don’t have to contend with as much waste heat and attendant component failure.

But according to NPPL, substituting DC power in data centers as a replacement for conventional AC power has not yet made significant inroads into many data centers because the technology is unfamiliar to many facility engineers.

Despite the wide-spread use of DC power in telecommunications, there is reluctance within the computer industry to switch to new technologies without field experience showing that the switch could be done safely and would have operational and economic benefits without causing unanticipated problems.

If DC would in fact be a more efficient type of power within servers themselves, might it be possible to site server farms to take advantage of the DC provided by integrated renewable energy generating systems such as solar PV and wind?

Photos:1.© Eimantas Buzas | Dreamstime.com; 2. Versageek via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

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