Tawanai

The energy crisis in Pakistan is changing the way telecom industry consumes and manages power. In a welcome move, Universal Service Fund has made it mandatory for the telecom operators in rural areas, where USF is providing subsidy, to power their infrastructure through renewable energy sources. This not only makes sense financially but also from an environmental perspective. Telenor and Warid had already taken some initiatives along these lines. Here’s the statement from USF.

It has been observed that commercial power has not reached most of the areas where USF is running rural telecom projects, which proves to be a barrier to provide smooth uninterrupted telecom service. Even where commercial power infrastructure is available, the availability of power is extremely limited. As a result, the telecom operators have to rely on diesel generators. But not only there is the cost of diesel, the re-fueling at these sites is also a big and expensive hassle. At the same time, there is also a great need for cross-cutting operational expenses for maintenance of remote and hard-to-reach remote sites. Therefore, it was decided in the meeting that operators will bid for all future infrastructure in unserved areas with renewable energy solutions.

This decision will play an important role in reducing the energy costs and is also a small contribution towards dealing with the energy crisis in Pakistan. Moreover, this initiative will also help reduce carbon content in the atmosphere.

Wind, solar and other forms of non-fossil fuel energy, such as hydro and geothermal can contribute in this effort. Thus hundreds of renewable energy solutions will get deployed which will not only reduce Green House Gasses (mainly CO2) emissions in the atmosphere, it will also help bring down prices of solar and wind power solutions in the country.

Clean Technology, Energy, Green, IT, Solar, Wind

Google has asked for approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to become an electricity marketer, essentially giving it the authority to buy and sell bulk power at market prices, just the way large utilities and energy traders do. Via WSJ.

Google’s power usage is unclear; it doesn’t disclose how many data centers it operates or where each is located. Last April, it said its data centers were the most efficient in the world, so far as it was able to determine, but declined to say how much power it actually uses.

Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, an online publication that tracks the data center industry, says he has identified about 24 Google data centers. He says it is common for large centers run by Internet companies to consume 30 to 50 megawatts of energy capacity.

Google’s largest data centers could use even more. A data center consuming 10 megawatts is about what a subdivision of single-family homes consumes. Based on an estimate of 24 large data centers, Google’s energy need would be roughly equivalent to the output of two large conventional power plants.

In 2007, Google announced its intention to become “carbon neutral,” meaning it would take actions to neutralize the effects of carbon dioxide produced in the course of furnishing its buildings and data centers with electricity. It installed a 1.6-megawatt solar array on its headquarters building and has been trying to obtain green power, when available.

If its FERC request is granted, “we could go directly to a renewable energy project and buy power for our operations,” says Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick. The company also wants the ability to enter into contracts for carbon offsets.

Google’s FERC application could also potentially allow the company to play a much larger role in energy markets, even becoming a wholesaler of electricity to other big buyers.

In its application, the company said it was reserving for itself the right to “act as a power marketer, purchasing electricity and reselling it to wholesale customers,” and trading “in the bulk power markets, such as arranging…transmission and fuel supplies.”

Buildings, Electricity, IT, power

Came across a paper from McKinsey which talks about how IT can cut its carbon footrpint.

The rapidly growing carbon footprint associated with information and communications technologies, including laptops and PCs, data centers and computing networks, mobile phones, and telecommunications networks, could make them among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters by 2020. However, our research also suggests that there are opportunities to use these technologies to make the world economy more energy and carbon efficient. An analysis of five groups of abatement opportunities finds that such technologies could help to eliminate 7.8 metric gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2020 equivalent to 15 percent of global emissions today and five times more than our estimate of the emissions from these technologies in 2020.

About the role of ICT in cutting emissions:

Information and communications technologies can help abate far more emissions in the general economy their own production and use generates. We estimated this abatement potential by studying all known opportunities to optimize energy productivity in four sectors—buildings, power, transport, and manufacturing. Then we calculated the specific energy savings and the associated abatement potential for one significant group of opportunities in each of the sectors. We also looked at a set of opportunities that cut across sectors:

telecommuting and other technological substitutions for emission-producing activities. In just these five areas, we identified annual reductions of 7.8 metric gigatons of carbon emissions by 2020. Because we did not review all prominent opportunities to reduce them—for example, we excluded satellite surveillance to monitor deforestation and herding, two of the largest contributors to climate change—the full impact of information and communications technologies could be much greater.

The full paper is available at McKinsey site or leave a comment.

Environment, Green, IT

Via Cisco website

Cisco today announced Smart Connected Buildings  as its latest emerging technology, a key component in delivering on its vision for Smart+Connected Communities, one of 30 key market adjacencies the company has identified.   Smart+Connected Communities addresses the growing need for sustainable energy to meet the demand of increasingly urbanized populations by providing a network-enabled blueprint for successful smart cities of the future that run on networked information.  The solution builds on Cisco’s networked sustainability platform to further utilize the network to increase energy efficiency, create new tools for ‘energy-aware’ city management, and enable economic opportunity and quality of life gains for citizens.

Buildings, Clean Technology, Energy, IT, Innovation

You may think that data centers can be located wherever real estate is cheap. Tech Review writes about the value of water to conserve electricity and improve efficiency. Check out the placement of data centers in very particular geographic locations.

In addition to bandwidth, data centers need electricity. Lots of it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that U.S. servers and data centers were responsible for a total of 1.5 percent of America’s electricity consumption in 2006 (about 61 billion kilowatt-hours), at a cost of $4.5 billion, and that their consumption will double by 2011. Not surprisingly, data-center owners have searched out sources of cheap electricity in the hydroelectric dams that dot the Rockies and the Northwest. Washington and Oregon, America’s top two hydroelectric-­producing states, have electricity costs 20 to 30 percent lower than the national average. As a result, small towns in places like the Columbia River basin are enjoying a data-center gold rush, often helped by local authorities who are willing to provide owners with fiber-optic connections to the rest of the world.

Clean Technology, Electricity, IT, Infrastructure, Water

Reducing energy-related operating expenses tops the list of motivations for pursuing greener IT operations. See the survey result below from Forrester Research.

Conservation, Economics, Energy, IT IT