Calculating Your Baseline GHG Emission

Doug Alder — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:05:23 +0000

Bill St. Arnaud, the Chief Research Officer and one of the leading network architects for CANARIE¹ wrote an excellent article on calculating your baseline GHG emission. Bold emphasis in the article is by me.In order to get started in carbon trading it is necessary to first establish your baseline, that is what amount of CO2 is your project/organization responsible for generating right now, and how and where is it being generated. Once you know this information you can begin planning for ways to reduce those emissions and thus earn carbon credits, and the best way to do that is to move your ICT infrastructure to a green data center. RackForce’s current K3 datacenter is very green and it’s new datacenter GigaCenter will be one of the greenest on the planet.

Here a couple of excellent web sites explaining the detail process of how to calculate baseline GHG emission data for your network, ICT equipment or cyber-infrastructure. Once you have established a baseline for your current emissions your organization can then explore how to go about reducing its GHG emissions in order to meet carbon neutrality goals either set by your organization or government and ultimately earn carbon offset dollars from various carbon trading exchanges and/or trusts.Virtualization of networks and computing through clouds or grids using SOA, as well as purchasing green power or moving infrastructure facilities to zero carbon data will be the most likely ways that organizations can reduce their GHG emissions in order to earn carbon offset dollars. But before proceeding with expensive and time consuming baseline GHG measurements, an organization should first determine whether they are ready to move to a world of virtual networks (including virtual routers and switches), virtual servers and cloud applications. If the organization’s “server huggers” are not prepared to let go of their physical computers, routers and switches, then there is no point in proceeding with a baseline assessment.Networks, ICT and cyber-infrastructure are about the only places in an organization where significant GHG reductions are possible. In most organizations in the service sector (education, health, government, banking, finance, telecom, etc) ICT is, by and far, the largest producer of GHG emissions. Although same savings in GHG emission can be made through video conferencing, tele-commuting, tele-work centers and adjusting building heating and cooling systems, these savings will be marginal compared to the savings that are possible through virtualization and use of green power, or relocating ICT equipment to zero carbon data centers.The dollar savings in energy costs and potential to earn carbon offset dollars can be the several of millions of dollars per year for a small to medium size organization (50 – 500 people).You can quickly do your own back of the envelope calculation of the potential dollars (within an order of magnitude) for your organization:

Each computer server produces 8 tons of CO2 per year

Each PC or laptop produces 4 tons of CO2 per year

Each printer or photocopier produces 10 tons of CO2 per year

Each router produces 20 tons of CO2 per year [commercial datacenter strength routers not your home D-Link style routers, those are about the same as a PC as they use about the same amount of power -DA}

Each Ethernet switch produces 5 tons of CO2 per year

Carbon offsets are currently trading between $7- $20 per ton, but next year Europe is projected to raise the carbon price from cap and trade to $100 per ton. It is expected that cost of carbon will soon rise to $400 to $1000 per ton over the next few years. The above numbers assume that all the electrical power used by the organization is generated from coal. However, even if your electrical power is from cleaner sources such as nuclear, gas and oil, it is expected that cap and trade will be push up cost of power from these sources at a slight discount of that power produced from coal. True renewable power such as that produced by windmills, hydro and solar systems may trade at a premium to the market, especially within large urban centers.Guidelines for Quantifying GHG Reductions from Grid-Connected Electricity Projectshttp://www.wri.org/stories/2007/09/guidelines-quantifying-ghg-reductions-grid-connected-electricity-projectsThe Purchase of http://www.thegreenpowergroup.org/retail.cfm?loc=us

For more of Bill’s excellent work please visit his websites

RackForce is in the preliminary phase of getting a complete verifiable GHG baseline analysis done for our new datacenter, GigaCenter and working with various consultants to discover the ways that our customers will be able to monetize their GHG savings by relocating to us. As GigaCenter will be one of, if not the most, efficient carbon neutral data centers in the world, through the extensive use of virtualization of servers and network, cloud and grid computing, advanced cooling techniques enabling high power/sq.ft. loading, and other new technologies that contribute to a PUE of 1.38 compared to industry norms of 2.5 to 4. Customers locating with RackForce, especially large enterprise customers who relocate a large amount of ICT infrastructure from inefficient data centers (pretty nearly every data center out there private or commercial at this time) should be able to reap significant financial rewards for doing so. They will lower their costs (through outsourcing the infrastructure) and reap carbon credits they can then apply against other parts of their organization or sell on the open market.RackForce is now pre-selling colocation space in gigaCENTER so don’t miss out on this opportunity, phase 1 space is selling out fast. Contact Doug Alder (dalder at rackforce.com) Direct: 1-250-448-2203 or Jay Robinson (jrobinson at rackforce.com) 1-250-717-2340 ext 2303 on our gigaCENTER sales team now to get started.

¹In 1998, CANARIE deployed CAnet 3, the world’s first national optical Internet research and education network. CAnet 3 was among the most advanced in the world when it was built, and its design has since been replicated by many network operators, both in the research and education as well as commercial domains. However, exponential growth in network traffic, expected growth in new high bandwidth applications, and planned extreme high bandwidth grid projects require that a new network be built to support leading-edge research in Canada. To this end, the Government of Canada committed $110 million to CANARIE for the design, deployment, and operation of CAnet 4.CAnet 4, as did its predecessor CAnet 3, interconnects the provincial research networks, and through them universities, research centres, government research laboratories, schools, and other eligible sites, both with each other and with international peer networks. Through a series of point-to-point optical wavelengths, most of which are provisioned at OC-192 (10 Gbps) speeds, CAnet 4 yields a total initial network capacity of between four and eight times that of CAnet 3

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Calculating Your Baseline GHG Emission

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