As the cap-and-trade bill (H.R. 2454) passed the U.S. House of Representatives, speculation and worries about its impact on data centers hit that market hard. The Datacenter Dynamics (DCD) conference held last week in San Francisco was the first DCD conference after the bill passed.




DCD’s Focus magazine featured this subject in its June 2009 issue, which carried an illustration of a bomb labeled “CARBON TAX” on the cover. See it here.

The DCD conference dedicated four sessions to this issue, and I went to all of them:

1. Introduction to the U.K.’s CRC
2. Carbon footprint reduction for data centers
3. Managing carbon risk and cost
4. Carbon risk at data centers (panel discussion)

In this blog, I will cover the first two.

Introduction to the U.K.’s CRC: The British Computer Society’s (BCS) Zahl Limbuwala (chairman of the data center specialist group) gave a good introduction to the U.K.’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) and its problems.





Zahl Limbuwala

Note that the European Union’s version of cap-and-trade is called Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and has been in effect for the past three years. CRC is unique to the U.K. beyond ETS and much more restrictive. These are some of the highlights:

• The baseline year is 2008 (GHG emissions are taxed according to net increase or decrease in power consumption in comparison with the baseline year).
• CRC captures power consumption from gas and electricity meters with all subsidiaries. Transport, however, is left out.
• Your power consumption is tabulated in a league table from the most to the least (more than 6,000 MWh/year use only), regardless of industries or suppliers/consumers. Efficiency is not factored in; your total consumption is counted. If you select a smaller supplier, you will be better off because smaller players consume less total power than big suppliers.

Now the problems:

• CRC is situated between consumers and suppliers, and goes after both consumers and suppliers.
• Contract resources, such as supply channel, are counted. If you outsource your data centers to colos, then your consumption at colos is not counted but counted as the colos’.
• Only consumption within the U.K.’s boundaries is counted. If you outsource your operations to France or Germany, your consumption is not counted.
• IT may reduce the total power consumption because IT may help reduce business trips. However, the current CRC does not consider such mitigation by IT.

With all its problems, CRC will be in effect in April 2010. The rest of Limbuwala’s presentation was on the BCS data center energy and cost simulator. This is similar to DC Pro by the U.S. Department of Energy. Their simulator can run a what-if scenario to compare power consumption between the two scenarios illustrated below.



Comparison graphs of two power consumption scenarios

Carbon footprint reduction for data centers: Victor Steffen and Vali Sorell of Syska Hennessy Group analyzed the source of the carbon footprint as it relates to the life cycle of data centers. As expected, the majority of the carbon footprint is in operations (electricity and mechanical parts), as shown in the picture below.

The only way to reduce the carbon footprint is to reduce power consumption. Their emphasis was to make electricity and mechanical parts more energy efficient. I’ll cover that in other future blogs.


Victor Steffen


Vali Sorell


Data center life cycle and carbon footprint