Part of the solution, not part of the problem

The ICT sector is regularly harangued about the “2%” figure – the amount of global carbon emissions attributable to ICT according to a Gartner report. That figure is oft-quoted alongside real dirty polluters such as the airline industry (who dump CO2 straight into the upper-atmosphere, bypassing many of the natural ground-level sequestration mechanisms), but what is often forgotten is that in exchange for our emissions (2-3% of total in the UK) we are contributing roughly 10% of UK GDP and 15% of national trade.

Further, we (the ICT sector) have our own house well in order and have committed to reducing our own emissions as I will describe shortly. However, of much greater important is what the intelligent use of ICT can do to reduce emissions in other sectors, as highlighted by several groups including GeSI:

“ICT can reduce annual global emissions by 15 per cent by 2020 and deliver energy efficiency savings to global businesses of over EUR 500 billion”
– Global e‐Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age, June 2008

Even the panda-people (the World Wildlife Fund) have got in on the act; their report with Gartner titled “Saving the 1st billion tonnes” puts the intelligent application of ICT in 10 key areas (eg. smart grid, intelligent buildings and transport avoidance) as being key to reducing our collective carbon emissions:

“‘Green IT’ is an oxymoron, until you consider use of IT to ‘green’ business and society.”
- Simon Mingay, Gartner10

Example: Transport avoidance

Perhaps the most obvious way that ICT can help is in transport avoidance. As David MacKay illustrates in his excellent (and free!) book Without Hot Air, personal transport in the form of driving cars and flying in jet aeroplanes are two of the worst things we do as a nation, together contributing to over 40% of our total energy consumption.

Cars are the worst offender, consuming a whopping 40 kilo Watt-hours (kWh) per day per person (to put that in perspective, we use about 4 kWh/d each on lighting). Even with electric cars we still have to get the energy to run them from somewhere, and there are simply not going to be enough renewables to go around at current usage levels. The only way to significantly reduce the energy consumption attributable to cars & planes is to use them less, and that is where ICT comes in; for example by enabling home working (tele-working), even if just one day a week, and reducing travel to meetings with telepresence technologies.

Keeping our own house in order

Although we can help reduce carbon emissions elsewhere, we absolutely must do so in a sustainable manner, which is why we in the ICT industry are putting lots of effort into keeping our own house in order. Last year, Intellect UK (Britain’s high-tech trade association) release their High-Tech: Low-Carbon report , which articulates an action plan on how the UK technology sector is going to reduce its emissions.

Further, Digital Europe (formerly EICTA) has committed to reduce Europe’s ICT-related carbon emissions by 20% by 2020. Many of us think that target is achievable by 2015, but how can I be so sure of dramatic carbon savings when our collective use of ICT is increasing constantly?

A lot of the existing inefficiencies of the sector lie in the data centre, and that is also where I expect to see the largest efficiency gains. The UK, in particular the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, has taken a global lead in advancing the field of energy efficiency within the data centre, and was instrumental in developing the European Union’s Code of Conduct for data centres, which stipulates a range of best practices for every layer of the IT service delivery stack (from mechanical & electrical to software selection).

Memset recently become the first British Web hosting provider become a participant to the Code of Conduct, and we encourage others to follow suit (which many already are). The Code is free, is not hard to do (I did ours in a day) and the best practices contained in it are designed to to improve efficiency which means saving money, so it is just good business sense.

Moore transistors please!

However, there is a much bigger effect that incremental improvements to data centre design, and that is the combination of Moore’s Law with virtualisation technology. The work done per Watt by servers has been increasingly roughly in line with Moore’s Law, ie. doubling every 18 months, and is expected to continue to do so. Now that virtualisation has reached the main stream it is being deployed en-masse, allowing legacy servers to be shut down and replaced with vastly more efficient virtual systems, usually consolidating physical machines by a factor of more than 10 to 1.

Take us as an example; this year we have deployed roughly 1,000 virtual servers. Each virtual machine (VM) would otherwise have been a physical server (or in many cases used to be before it was migrated to us), and in fact many people are still using cheap old tower PCs for cheap hosting, but thankfully that practice is dying out. A normal server or PC uses around 90-120 Watts continuously, whereas one of our Xen-based Miniserver VMs uses 5-10Watts, but does the same work. Taking into account cooling and other data centre inefficiencies lets just call it 100Watts saving in round numbers:

1,000 VMs x 100 Watts = 100,000 Watts
x 30.4 days x 24 hours = 73,000 kWh / month
x 430g / kWh = 31,400 kg CO2 / month

So just from what we have done in our little corner of the ICT sector, just with new customers and in just one year, we have helped avoid over 30 tonnes per month, or 360 tonnes per year, of carbon dioxide emissions. To put that in context, each British citizen is responsible for about 9 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. Not bad for 18 people in Guildford!

Being green is just good business sense

When it comes to ICT services, especially in the data centre, the two things that cost you the most money also cause the most carbon emissions; manufacturing the hardware (the servers / computers) and electricity to run them. In short:

Green = Efficient = Lower costs

There really is no excuse for us as an industry not to improve our energy-and-carbon efficiency, and companies that don’t will end up with higher cost bases and ultimately will be driven out of business by their more efficient competitors.

Conclusion: Let ICT do its job

The Intellect Work Programme has estimated that the knowledge economy now employs 41% of the UK workforce, and that it will account for roughly 50% of GBP by 2010. Data centres are ever-more becoming the backbone of UK PLC, and a healthy ICT industry is vital for both cutting our carbon emissions (as described above) and for driving our economic growth in the next decade.

Further, the ICT sector already has its house well in-order, so it is important that any policy measures do not interfere with the industry’s growth. Unfortunately, well-intended but poorly-conceived legislation such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment, which in the next few months is being rushed through with little-to-no consultation with industry, threatens ICT’s ability to deliver on its promise of supporting a prosperous, more sustainable society. Hopefully the next government will just let us do our job.

Decoding the academic paper

First I started with what appears to be the only paper on the subject; “Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing: Hybrid Assessment Combining Process and Economic Input-Output Methods” by Eric Williams of the United Nations University in Japan, and published in Environmental Science & Technology in 2004.

Unfortunately the paper bundles CRT (old-style monitor) production in with the figures which really muddies the waters, especially given that they are redundant technology) However, there seems to be one very nice bit of information embedded in the paper – a table listing the electricity, fossil, and total energy use in computer production. A quick bit of analysis: The total estimated cost of production is 6,400MJ, and if we remove the CRT-specific bits, we take off:

• CRT manufacture/assembly: 255MJ
• bulk materials – CRT 800MJ
• printed circuit boards: 20MJ (est)
• electronic chemicals: 200MJ (est)
• other processes: 400MJ (est)
• Total: 1,675MJ

So, from the paper a PC’s production is about 4,700MJ, which is 1,300kWh. At a green IT conference at Oxford University last year, Fujitsu gave a great presentation on their new super-green PC fabrication plant, and asserted that their range of green PCs took 730kWh to make (materials, production & distrubution). If his numbers are right that is an impressive improvement in 4 years, but Fujitsu have been working hard in the area. Of course, that does also depend on my estimates of what proportion are down the the CRT – I shouldn’t think I’m far off though (I’m good with numbers ).

As an aside, this is very interesting from a recycling point of view. Most PC manufacturers, be it Fujitsu, Dell or IBM will proudly telling us about less than 2% goes to landfill, but if you think about it surely the only energy that can be “reclaimed” from manufacture would be the bulk materials; all the energy of making chips, assembly, PCBs, transport etc is entirely lost. Therefore, in reality one could at most hope to recover perhaps 800-1,000MJ of the original energy-cost (ie. about 20%).

A server is just a PC with a slightly different set of components (an extra disk & more RAM, but less additional cards like graphics & audio), so I think it is reasonable to assume they are similar. Therefore, I pick a figure half way between what I have deduced from the paper (1,300 kWh) and the only convincing figure I have had from a vendor (730 kWh) and have gone for 1,000 kWh in my estimations.

Sweat the desktops

So what about the fabrication energy vs. utilisation? Well, I think the paper’s 81% fab, 19% use lifetime cost is probably no longer very accurate. First, he assumes 3 hours per day, which is far too low given the number of office PCs out there and the often intensive use of family PCs. Second, I think a 3 year lifetime is too low – most people I know use their PCs much longer (they get passed down / re-used rather than thrown away) – I believe the Fujitsu figure of 6.6 years for home users at least.

I would not, however, disagree totally with his figure of 128W for PC+screen – the gains we have made in LCD screen efficiency have been outweighed by power-hungry CPU-intensive machines in recent years, although that trend is reversing. Fujitsu’s figure was 80W for their “green” PC in full power mode, and an average LCD screen uses about 20W (about half a similar CRT).

So, a quick updated estimate (based on an average of PC & home use):

120W * 5 hours/day * 365 * 5 years ~= 1,100 kWh

If we assume LCD screens are as energy intensive as CRTs and go with Eric’s figure of 1,700 kWh for production then the ratio is 61% fab : 39% use.

If we assume that Fujitsu are telling the truth though then it is 730kWh in fabrication, plus ~300kWh for a screen (a guestimate – it is about 465 kWh for a CRT), giving about 1,000kWh fabrication then the embedded vs. use energies are almost equal.

If one then does the calculation based on an office PC usage pattern and a 6.6 year lifetime, then even with more energy efficient PCs the ratio is more like 35% fab : 65% use.

Therefore, I think that we can conclude that the ratio of production energy to usage energy for a PC (with or without screen – the proportions seem about the same) range widely from something like (35% fab : 65% use) to (70% fab : 30% use), and that the main determining factor is the usage pattern of the PC, which is also the one bit of data that we probably have the worst grasp on. Either way, though, you will use less energy overall if you sweat the desktop PCs, as we discussed in the recent BCS Green IT debate.

Replace the servers

The situation is very different for a server, however. A typical modern 1U pizza-box server will use 80W when idle and 140W when working hard. Most of the time they are not straining, so call it 100W:

100W * 24 hours/day * 365 * 1.25 PUE ~= 1,100 kWh per year

In other words, a server uses about the same amount of energy as was required to create it every single year, and the same amount that a PC with a fairly average usage pattern uses in 5 years.

Because of this it is worth while to replace servers with more efficient models on a fairly regular basis. Moore’s Law (that transistor density doubles every 18 months) means that server work capacity per Watt is increasing by a factor of 4 every 3 years. This means, that provided you are using the servers properly (virtualisation etc) and consolidating onto a smaller number of newer machines, if you replace a 3 year old server its 1,000 kWh embedded energy cost will be saved by the 3 you are turning off (4:1 consolidation) in only 4 months.

• What does it take to be really green?
• What needs to be in IT policies?
• How can we tell myth from truth in an emotive area?

The protagonists:

• Chair: BCS managing editor Brian Runciman.
• Tracey Rawling Church from Kyocera Mita
• Louise Richards, chief executive, Computer Aid International
• David Critchley, director of retail and professional services at Cisco
• Kate Craig Wood, managing director of Memset and a member of the BCS Data Centre SG

“The current design of the scheme will encourage transfers of carbon liability, rather than a net overall reduction in emissions across the UK.”

“The current design of the scheme will only encourage energy efficiency in a context of stunted growth. At the heart of this problem lies the proposed design of the league table, and the suggested metric to be used for ranking and recycling purposes.”

In this article I will look at how the CRC works in the context of data centres, why it will will not significantly reduce our carbon emissions, and how the it threatens to stifle growth and innovation in a sector vital for our economic and environmental health.

Data centres use in the region of 2.2-3.3% of Britain’s total grid power. While that is a considerable amount, ICT has been repeatedly identified as a key mechanism through which our society will reduce our carbon emissions. The World Wildlife Fund have identified ICT as the way to “save the first billing tons” of carbon, and the Global eSustainability Initiative SMART 2020 report has identified now the intelligent application of ICT can reduce our annual global emissions by 15% by 2020.

Data centres lie at the heart of ICT’s potential to reduce our collective carbon emissions. We, the ICT sector, are not the enemy; we are part of the solution to climate change.

Further, data centres are absolutely key to our national prosperity. Britain’s knowledge economy now employes 41% of the population, and will account for 50% of GDP by 2010. Data centres are the backbone of UK Plc, vital to the resilience of public services and the competitiveness of British business. The ICT sector, powered by data centres, promises to be one of the engines of economic growth which can lift us out of recession, and must be allowed to do so.

We are not idle about our The European IT industry, through Digital Europe (formerly EICTA) has already committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 20% by 2020. The UK has taken a leadership role in on data centre energy efficiency. The British Computer Society in particular has been a key player in the development of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, and the globally-leading cost and energy data centre simulator (in partnership with the Carbon Trust). We, the UK data centre industry, have our house well in order.

The CRC scheme is part of the UK government activity seeking to cut carbon emissions by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. The most effective way to achieve this goal is to encourage energy users responsible for emissions to reduce their energy consumption on the one hand, and adopt efficiency measures on the other.

However, the government’s scheme plans to allocate the entire carbon liability to the utility bill payer, irrespective of whether the bill payer is in fact using the energy, or a key player in the decision to use this energy.

The basic mechanism for the purpose of this discussion is that any organisation that consumes greater than 6,000 Mega-Watt Hours (mWh) electrical energy per year is automatically captured and all of the electrical (and some other) consumption of that organisation and all subsidiaries is totalled to represent the carbon of the organisation.

6,000 mWh per year is equivalent to a continuous load of 685 Kilo-Watts (kW), roughly 500 kW of IT equipment load in a moderately well-run data centre, which is around 5,000 efficient modern 1U servers (assuming 100W per server). For a poorly run monolithic ‘old school’ data centre with an excess of power and cooling infrastructure, using 3-4 year old servers it might be as few as 2,000 machines.

Operators will have their energy use base lined and then be required to report their energy consumption. The organisation then has to purchase allowances to cover the total carbon in a similar way to the power generators under the EU ETS6. This is intended to add direct financial incentives for the carbon associated with the electrical energy consumed by the data centre operator.

Data centre operators do have the ability to reduce the carbon footprint in newer more modern data centres, and by taking advantage of the relentless improvements in the energy-efficiency of IT equipment. They could contract out the carbon liability of the utility bill back to the customer. At Memset, we have that facility already; it is a trivial matter to put a customer’s approximate share of our total energy consumption onto invoices.

The customer would then would be incentivised to alter its behaviour and chose more energy-efficient criteria in the data centre. An example might be choosing to migrate older servers into a virtualised environment. Furthermore, the high price of energy is already an incentive for operators to encourage their customers to embrace more environmentally friendly solutions; electricity already accounts for roughly one third of our direct costs.

However, as the government’s CRC scheme places the onus to reduce emissions on the organisation which pays the electricity bill, not the end-user, responsibly organisations like us cannot pass the carbon down the supply chain and thus encourage our customers to reduce their usage.

As a result of this, it makes no sense to own your own data centre, and I expect to see a massive increase in data centre outsourcing. That will actually be a good thing for my business, but I so firmly believe that the CRC as it stands will be detrimental to our emissions overall that I am speaking out against it.

Outsourcing a corporate data centre or entire ICT department would, under the current
allocation approach result in the carbon also being outsourced. While clear ‘carbon dumping’ could otherwise lead to reputational damage, data centre outsourcing is a common practice; there would be no way of determining whether the outsourcing that might take place post CRC implementation was driven by genuine business reasons, or a desire to shift the carbon liability.

Furthermore, as energy costs in the UK are currently less competitive than in continental Europe, the additional carbon costs could encourage businesses to offshore. Data centres are by nature geographically flexible. Off-shoring to the continent is a realistic possibility, and the cost of running a data centre in the UK may tip the scales in its favour. This in turn will have wider implications for jobs in the UK, and data and application security.

That said, if organisations do outsource the bulk of their energy-consuming activities to more efficient third parties, the overall net emissions for the UK will reduce, and the CRC will have proved fit for purpose. However, the current design of the performance league table inhibits this from being the case.

The league table is an apparently simple mechanism for the processing and comparison of the carbon reported by each CRC organisation, but will actually create utterly perverse incentives.

The current proposals suggest that rankings in the table will be determined by two metrics: absolute growth in emissions, and relative growth in emissions. After the initial phase of the scheme, the former metric is expected to be weighted at 75%, and the latter at 25% (though it is unclear how DECC reached these figures). As a result, any business growth, even if accompanied by increased overall energy efficiency, could result in an organisation dropping down the league table!

For a data centre, our energy consumption is directly related to our revenues, and as previously mentioned the sector’s continued growth is key to supporting UK PLC and delivering ICT’s promise of reduced carbon emissions across society. The CRC as it stands will reputationally damage data centres who dare grow.

Further still, for companies like Memset that are already leading the market in terms of energy efficiency, and for whom the opportunities for improvement are very few, the CRC is quite simply unfair. It will have been much better to start out as being really bad and then to artificially manage a slow improvement in energy efficiency in order to maximise the league table position. We will look significantly worse than our horribly energy-inefficient competitors, which will result in the customers being mis-directed to use more carbon-intensive providers.

In summary, the CRC as it stands will encourage “carbon laundering” with the outsourcing (or even off-shoring) of data centre operations to avoid brand value damage, will inhibit the growth of one of the UK’s most important business sectors, and will encourage end-users to use the least efficient providers.

The CRC is already changing business behaviours in negative ways. We (as a managed hosting provider) were planning to invest in a leading, semi-experimental, “super-green” data centre in Surrey, which would incorporate a number of the latest innovations in efficient data centre design, and push the boundaries of the technologies further.

However, because the CRC penalises companies that pay the electricity bill it no longer makes sense for us to own and operate a data centre, since instead we can just rent space and power from an existing data centre and let their brand get hit by the league tables, not ours. In this case, the CRC has been directly responsible for stopping an award-winning leader in the field of green IT from investing in the next stage of innovation.

Further, as it stands the CRC may make it more economical to offshore part of our data centre operations; as long as the servers are within a hundred miles of their users it does not matter for 99% of applications.

This is especially frustrating since we already have the capability to account to our customers for their carbon usage (we have been able to do that since becoming Carbon Neutral!), so we could easily pass the carbon levy / “credits” along to our customers. That in turn would further incentivise them to minimise their indirect energy usage through us.

As the CRC stands it will make managed hosting providers with UK-based data centre operations (like Memset) less competitive to those not under the jurisdiction of the CRC (like Amazon EC2), regardless of how well-managed and how efficient we are.

The CRC at present creates the incentive to launder, rather than reduce, carbon emissions and rewards organisations good at playing the ‘carbon game’, not those who are most energy-efficient.

The legislation is a threat to UK skills and employment. From the British Computer Society’s review of the proposed CRC legislation:

“The combined impact of the incentives created by the CRC driving outsourcing of ICT and data centre services both within and outside the UK is likely to reduce the number of skilled jobs in this sector as well as removing the most significant opportunity afforded by this political will, the development in the UK of world leading, exportable skills and technology in energy constrained ICT. “

Finally, contrary to its purpose, the CRC threatens to impede growth and innovation in the data centre industry, and thus inhibit ICT’s ability to deliver the massive carbon savings so clearly identified by numerous reputable sources.

One of the most interesting things I heard that day was that the music industry’s carbon footprint (which is not that bad – around 2% of total or some such) does a whopping 25% of their environmental damage due to festivals, and that 40% of that is due to people driving to them!! When I went to Download last month we (2 adults, 2 kids) hired a diesel and drove there because it was cheaper than going by train. Sheer madness! Can’t blame the music industry for the inadequacies and negative-economic-incentives around our national mass transit systems.

The music industry has commissioned research with Oxford university which, it claims, shows that CDs are “not that bad compared with downloads”. Now to me with my technologist hat on, that makes no sense at all. How can sending data around on thin bits of heavily processed million-year-old sea-critter be even close in energy efficiency to shuffling some electrons and photons down wires and fibres?

Before starting, I find it useful to get some real-world perspective on the numbers. We are going to be talking about electrical loads, so here are some examples: a modern ceramic kettle uses 3,000Watts (W), my hair dryer uses 1,500W, a modern TV on standby uses 1W and a 100W filament light bulb uses, wait-for-it… 100W!

The human body uses 100W, and your brain uses 20W. Unlike a computer, though, your brain does not use more energy when you think harder.

- Servers

Lets assume a 2U, 10 Tera Byte (TB) server (Dell PowerEdge 2950 with 6x2TB disks) with a 100Mega bits per second (Mbps) uplink capacity. For resilience, lets stick three at different locations around the UK and have some redundancy (any one of the three can be offline).

Each of those machines will use about 300Watts (W) when working moderately hard (we benchmarked them ourselves), so stick them in a mediocre PUE 1.5 data centre and we have 450W for one, 1,350W for all three. Networking kit will be a minimal overhead, easily absorbed into the PUE.

To be complete we should include the embedded carbon of the servers too. According to my educated guesstimate of embedded energy, an average server probably uses 1,000 kWh in its manufacture. These are big-ish servers, so lets call it 1,500 kWh. Spread over a 3 year working lifetime:

1,500,000 Wh / ( 3 years * 356 days * 24 hours ) = 58 W effective consumption

Three lots of that becomes 175W, added into our 1,350W becomes 1,525W. As you can see, the power required to run the servers completely dwarfs the power consumed by them during their lifetime.

Rummaging through my iTunes folder, it looks like an album averages roughly 100 Mega Bytes (MB) (7-8MB/song, 12-14 songs). 100 MB at 2 Million bits per second (Mbps) (the average we are all supposed to have by 2012 according to the Digital Britain report) gives us 6 minutes, 40 seconds to download an album.

Assume that we leave the servers on all the time, and that we only use them for 8 hours in every 24, but while we are using them we are maxing 2/3 out (200 Mbps), we get a download capacity of:

(( 200 Mbps / 8 bits ) * 3600 seconds * 8 hours ) = 720 Giga Bytes (GB) per day, or 7,200 albums per day.

Our servers, on continuously (and erring on the side of caution) will use:

1,525 W * 24 hours = 36,600 Watt-hours = 36.6 KiloWatt-hours (KWh)

That gives us an energy used to host and serve the album (including life cycle carbon cost of the kit) of:

( 36,600 / 7,200 ) = 5.1 Wh per download.

By way of comparison, bringing a litre of water (half a kettle) from room temperature to boiling takes 87 Wh. Not a lot to write home about so far!

- What about the PC?

So, what about the home PC? Well in the infamous “Google searches use loads of energy” story journalistic incompetence ruled and they included 15 minutes of high-performance home PC energy usage in the calculation, which totally dwarfed the energy used at the data centre.

If you are curious, Google uses commodity hardware, and tells you how long a search takes. A fair assumption would be that 2-3 servers get used in one search, and that they are using about 100W each. A search for “blah” takes 0.12 secs. Add in their PUE of around 1.2 and you get:

( ( 100 W * 3 servers * 1.2 ) * 0.12 seconds ) = 43.2 Watt-seconds = 0.012 Wh

Your brain used twice that reading this sentence!

Anyway, lets factor in the PC so that the raving-lentilist-luddites don’t dismiss this out of hand: At home, a modern PC + screen uses around 150W and a laptop uses perhaps 80, so lets call it 120W. Lets also assume you are either staring at screen or gone away and not using it while the music downloads (silly scenario, but going for worth-case). That gives us:

120W * ( 400 / 3600 secs ) = 13.5 Wh.

So, our grand total per album download is about 18.6Wh. Enough to boil a quarter of a litre of water (one cup of tea). Assuming a British mix of power generation (0.718g/Wh), that is equivalent to about 13.4g CO2.

So, how do we measure a CD? This is tricky, since there are negatives and positives arguably. On the one hand, the manufacturing process is energy intensive, as is delivery, but on the other this could be viewed as a form of carbon sequestration – just as buying books and keeping them on your shelves is good from a climate change point of view.

- Delivery

Lets assume 1,000 CDs in the back of a transit van, being delivered from EMI’s factory to an HMV outlet. The CDs are probably going to have to travel on average at least 200 miles. A van will do something like 400 miles on 40 litres, so 20 litres for our 1000-CD journey.

Petrol is 0.73g/cm3 and 90% of it by weight is carbon atoms. Thus, it is 0.66g/cm3 carbon, or 660 g / litre, which when you add on two oxygen atoms to each carbon atom becomes about 2,000 g / litre.

Therefore, our deliver carbon is:

20 litres * 2,000 g = 40,000g / 1000 CDs = 40 g CO2 per CD.

I’m being generous and ignoring the carbon-cost of manufacturing and maintaining the van, but lets keep it optimistic.

- Packaging & the disk itself

According to the Music Industry’s own publication “Julie’s Bicycle: Reducing the carbon emissions of CD packaging” a plastic CD box’s manufacture causes around 350g CO2, a card wallet would cause about 20g CO2, and the CD itself is around 100g CO2.

Lets by really optimistic and only look at a CD in a card wallet; that is around 120g CO2, which becomes 160g CO2 when delivered to your local HMV store. Oh dear.

Conclusion

Downloading an album: ~14g CO2
(including the time to power the PC while downloading)

Creating & transporting a CD: ~160g CO2
(>500g CO2 if its in a plastic box)

However, what the music industry themselves seem to have failed to notice is that, just with books, all the CDs on your shelves are mostly carbon, and if you don’t throw them away that is a great form of carbon sequestration*. Personally, though, I’d rather download music and have a pot plant where my CD stack currently lives, and that is definitely more environmentally friendly.

* As pointed out by Doug (see below) CDs are of course not a form of carbon sequestration comparable with books since the carbon in plastic comes from fossil fuels, which are quite happily sequestered away until we go and dig them up!

Materials, manufacture and distribution of an average PC currently in use today is is between 750 kilo Watt hours (kWh) for the most modern “green” PCs, and 1,300 kWh for machines of a few years go. You then have to add on about 300kWh for a LED screen (500kWh for a CRT screen). Even if we take the best case scenario we are still looking at a minimum of 1,000kWh for a desktop system, and laptops will only be a little less (most of the energy in PC manufacture goes into making the small, complex components such as chips).

An average PC made within the last few years, with its screen, uses about 100W when powered up and 3W when in hibernate mode. If we assume that the PC is on for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, and is hibernating overnight we get 200kWh/year “on” usage and 20kWh/year standby usage.

So, a 3-4 year old PC probably used 1,200kWh to make and uses 220kWh/year to run, whereas a modern super-green PC might use 1,000kWh to make and burn 150kWh/year. To look at it financially, you will save about £7/year by switching to a super-green PC. Therefore it makes neither financial nor environmental sense to swap out old PCs before about 6 years. If you need to update the software, then switch to some sort of virtual desktop infrastructure instead and use the PCs as thin clients.

The same sums applied to servers on 24/7 are quite different though. An average £1,000 1U rack-mount server bought 3-4 years ago probably “cost” about 1,000-1,500kWh to make and uses 120W at moderate load, which over a year is 1,050kWh, or at least 1,500kWh when data centre cooling is taken into account. The latest equivalent “green” servers use as little as 80W, so swapping to energy efficient servers will save 400kWh/year in electricity and get you 2-4 times more performance.

With good use of virtualisation to consolidate existing applications onto a smaller number of machines (thus taking advantage of the performance improvements) it makes clear environmental and economic sense to replace machines after 2-3 years. Alternatively, if IT is not your core business activity then you could always consider outsourcing your server infrastructure to a carbon neutral IT host such as Memset of course.

As for the old servers, why not give them away to Africa via Computer Aid International, where our “outdated” hardware is much needed and will be put to good & efficient use (ie. it will only be on when they need it).

Addendum June 2009: There are some very cool technologies like Very PC’s Greenhive (a hybrid between PCs and thin client) which are changing the argument around replacing desktop PCs.

Thin client is also reaching maturity now that you can get a decent amount of bandwidth from ADSL and that Windows Server 2008 includes most of the functionality of Citrix at no extra charge. Thin client is definitely the future I think.

In this article I shall try to point out some examples of “environmental activities” that do little more than salve our conscience, making us feel we are “doing something good”, thus diverting attention from the real problem areas, as well as some examples of what I feel are total “green myths”.

Myth: Switch it off / standby power

There has been widespread media coverage of a “turn it off” campaign. Certainly, not leaving electrical devices (be it a PC or a TV) on at all times is plain wasteful, but getting people to totally turn such devices off at the plug rather than just letting it go into standby mode is, frankly, a bit of a waste of time.

The problem is that the figures used by the media are at least ten years out of date. For example, a modern TV built within the last 6 years uses about 0.5Watts in standby mode. That means that a TV would have to be on standby for about a month to use the same energy as boiling a kettle (approx 0.3kWh, or about 0.13KG CO2)!

Also, we should not forget that all the energy we use ultimately ends up as heat, thus warming up the office or house a little. Therefore, if the building is being heated at that time of year the the energy is not wasted anyway. In fact, when you compare the net effect of leaving devices on standby (rather than unplugging them) with the total carbon footprint of a typical home (most of which comes from burning gas), the total contribution is only 0.3%. If you want to make a difference, turn the thermostat down and wear a jumper – don’t worry about standby power.

The same applies to PCs; a modern desktop computer (with screen) will use around 2 Watts when in hibernate mode. Getting people to shut down their machines totally at night inconveniences them and wastes their time the next morning when they have to boot up and get back to where they were. Promoting the use of hibernate rather than shutting down is much better since they are more likely to do it, or even better use the built-in power management facilities in the PC to automatically standby or hibernate after a period of inactivity.

Myth: Home working is not that green

Travel is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we do in day-to-day life. Even if driving a very fuel efficient car, a 20 kilometres journey (ie. a short round-trip commute) will produce around 2KG of carbon emissions. Obviously public transport is much better, but it still better to encourage staff to work from home some of the time where practical.

The myth here is that someone working at home uses more energy than in the office because they are heating the house. Even in fairly cool climates, modern, well insulated homes only lose a few degrees celsius during the day, and since most people tend to prefer working in a slightly cooler environment anyway the natural dip in daytime temperature is not an issue. As well as that, most people would have their heating set to come on to have warmed up the house by the time they got home regardless so the overall effect is negligible. Additionally, if you get a proportion of the workforce to work remotely you can have smaller offices, which means less lighting, heating etc. Encouraging home working is definitely good from a green perspective.

One alternative though is to encourage staff to use more efficient modes of transport for commuting of course!

Myth: IT is very harmful to the environment

The IT industry has recently been the subject of some negative media attention regarding its contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions (around 2% globally according to Gartner). In particular, there have been comparisons to the airline industry which contributes a similar amount. Such comparisons are simply not appropriate; yes, the IT industry may generate 2-3% of Europe’s carbon emissions, but it contributes around 10% of our total GDP!

Additionally, the IT sector as a whole has been making huge leaps forwards in recent years. A server bought in 2006, for example, used twice the power and did half the work of one bought today; a four fold improvement. That said, there is still a lot of work to do in improving the efficiency of data centres, but again we are taking the issues very seriously and are making huge leaps forwards in efficiency thanks to technologies such as virtualisation.

Finally, IT is a key enabler of energy efficiency in other sectors; everything from home working (above) to efficient logistics. One could even argue that the 2% contribution is more than repaid by the use of IT to reduce other industries carbon footprint. If you are interested in what the IT industry is doing to combat climate change then read Intellect’s (the UK’s high tech trade association) recent report High Tech: Low Carbon – The role of technology in tackling climate change.

As a slight aside it is also worth remembering that, in the case of a desktop PC at least, the embedded energy cost of manufacture and distribution (around 1,000 kWh, of half a tonne of CO2) is a large proportion of its lifetime energy cost. What this means is that it is worth trying to avoid replacing desktop PCs for as long as possible. Over a 5 year lifetime with typical office use, an average PC’s total energy cost would be roughly 50% in manufacture and 50% in electricity used. The situation is different for servers, however, and in some cases it makes both environmental and economic sense to replace them after 2-3 years.

Myth: Recycling paper is great

Many businesses make a big show of how good they are at recycling paper. In reality though, while it is certainly a good thing to do, it is not one of the big issues we should be worrying about; most of our paper comes from renewable sources in Norway, not from deforestation of rain forests, and in fact the energy needed to recycle paper is only marginally less than the energy needed to extract it from the tree in the first place. Additionally, because of shortening of fibres in the paper you can only recycle it about 3 times, and if you use cross-cut shredders then you cannot recycle the paper at all.

As well as the above, one could argue that growing trees, turning them into paper and then burying them in landfill sites is actually a rather good method of carbon sequestration, provided that you capture the any methane produced from the landfill by anaerobic degradation of organic waste.

There is a danger that focusing on things like paper recycling becomes a distraction, encouraging people to believe they are doing real good when what they should be worrying about are things like using less energy in the office, travelling less and improving the utilisation of IT existing resources. That said, recycling paper (and trying to avoid using it at all) is certainly something that we should do, we just need to retain perspective and realise that it is much less significant than many other environmental initiatives.

Myth: We can’t make a real difference, so there is no point trying

I am frequently faced with apathetic views on tackling climate change, the basic premise being that the developing world (especially China) is going to vastly outstrip Europe in terms of greenhouse gas emissions perhaps within a decade at its current rate of development.

Yes, in reality, even if the whole of Europe became super-green it would not be enough to reverse the global trend – we need to encourage the developing world to be more efficient as well. Therefore, what we should be doing in business is demonstrating to China and similar countries that it is possible to be green while still having a vibrant economy and not inconveniencing end-users. Europe’s collective role in combating climate change will not ultimately be down to our own reductions alone; it will be though us being exemplars to the rest of the world on how to be a successful low-carbon economy.

First of all we need to be clear on what we mean by utility computing; very few organisations are offering true utility computing (ie. computing resources as a utility, in much the same way as gas, water or electricity is supplied) although there are some analogues. Our services, in some senses, can be regarded as utility computing, because we make computing facilities (specifically CPU resource, storage and bandwidth) available in convenient bite-sized chunks and allow customers to easily upgrade/downgrade.

A typical example is one of our Xen-based Miniserver Virtual Machines; a client might initially just want 256MB of RAM and 30GB of disk space, but in time their requirements might grow beyond one machine and onto a cluster of powerful dedicated servers. This approach (allowing the client to start small and grow the resource allocation as needed) gives very large cost savings to them (as well as no up-front capital expenditure) and is very green; we balance the load across our pool of Miniserver host machines to make efficient use of the available disk and CPU resource (bandwidth is secondary since if you don’t use it all, it is not really consuming power).

We, however, are progressively moving towards true utility computing. The next step is our deployment of on-demand clusters where the client has 10 (say) servers dedicated to his/her application, but at normal loads only 3 are required, so only 3 are powered up most of the time. As demand increases our in-house management software spots the trend and (ahead of requirement) brings the other nodes in the cluster online. We plan to incentivise our clients to use this system by billing them separately for electricity, so if they let us turn off the machines that are there just to cope with load spikes and normally not being used, it costs them less.

Our longer-term vision is to combine the two so that we can fully virtualise customers’ server clusters and dynamically allocate them to machines in our server pool that are not necessarily dedicated to them. That is when you truly get the big cost and energy savings; imagine us hosting a big online game in the same data centre as a back office function of a large corporate. During the daytime the back office function might need 50 servers to run, and the game only 10, but during the night the game might need 50 and the back office 10. With traditional provisioning you would have at least 100 machines on and running all the time, but with our system you 60 or less. In reality it is even worse since no sane CIO would run his application without some overhead room to cope with load spikes, but again you get that for free with utility computing since the load spikes just become a ripple on top of all the baseline operations, saving you even more cost and carbon. I estimate that if all our UK data centre operations were running in a true utility computing environment we would be able to reduce our power and hardware requirements by a factor of ten.

There is a catch though; to get the really big savings (in terms of money, energy and hardware) you need to consolidate large numbers of diverse applications (with different load characteristics and different usage patterns) into a small number of big data centers, or at least a small number of big utility computing pools. The problem is that most CIOs are still unsure about the security of virtualisation (for no good reason I might add), let alone allowing their applications to “roam” freely across pools of servers, being allocated CPU & disk resources that might have moments ago been used for one of their competitors.

As with most green initiatives, to get the real benefits of utility computing we need to change the way we think and operate at a organisational level – rolling out some shiny new technologies by itself is not enough. In this case we need to lose our outdated attachment to tin and the idea that “this application runs on those boxes there”. Instead we should view CPU time and storage space as facilities to be rented as and when needed, in much the same way as we do with bandwidth. After all, the routers feeding your ‘net connection might have been being used for something quite other moments before, but we don’t care – why should we with servers?

The recent flurry of interest in getting the power consumption down in data centres in the UK has in large part been driven by a swathe of city firms suddenly realising that not only are they running out of power in their current central-London data suites, but they can’t get any more space and capacity either – power is already being reserved for the 2012 Olympics, for example. Also, there are a number of city data centres being run at dangerous capacities, and I’ll be watching with interest when the first of those super high density suites goes into thermal runaway after a brief power outage; the chillers are not run off the UPS, and therefore are shut down for a few mins while the backup generators start. At high power density in confined spaces that is potentially long enough to result in a non-reversible catastrophic failure process (similar to one we have seen in action). I suspect we may see a major bank with melted blade servers in the near future…

But I’m rambling; I’m not interested in those power-and-space constrained city firms (they should just move their non-trading- / non-latency-sensitive back-office applications out of town), my point here is that all CIOs should be taking note of their IT infrastructure’s energy usage. Why? Well on the one hand it is good for PR – in a recent survey that my company, Memset undertook 48% of the new customers we gained since going Carbon Neutral in August ’06 said that energy efficiency was “important” when choosing a supplier. Interestingly, only 39% said offsetting / carbon neutrality was important, which suggests to me that buyers are realising that treating the cause is better than treating the symptoms.

On top of the good PR, as an industry we need to be prepared to combat negative press on the issue. Recent calculations based on server sales in the UK estimate that 1.9% of the UK’s grid power goes to powering data centres, which is a massive amount. Some papers used a similar figure from Gartner (that the UK industry worldwide contributes 2% of total greenhouse emissions) to compare us with the airline industry (who also contribute 2% apparently, which is further worsened by the greenhouse effect of contrails), but that at least is easily dismissed; the IT sector contributes something like 10% to UK’s GDP, so we are putting our 2% power usage to very good use at least! Regardless, I would not be surprised to see data centres becoming targets of environmental protests in years to come if we are not careful.

Even if we put all that wholesome planet saving stuff aside for a moment though there is a still a solid reason to be taking energy efficiency in the data centre seriously: a few simple steps can much more than halve the electricity bill.

First lets consider the changes in server power usage. I did an article in May ’06 (getting value for wattage) highlighting the improvements in server energy usage, and since then things have improved even further with the advent of Intel’s multi core chips. Take a standard £1,000 ($2,000) Dell 1U “workhorse” server. Eighteen months ago that got you a dual Xeon machine that used about 200W when working at moderate load. Today, we are buying dual core machines that, thanks to Dell & Intel’s good work on efficiency, are more powerful yet use only 100Watts under moderate load (in other words the same as a bright light bulb).

Next lets factor in the changes in data centre infrastructure technologies and design in the last few years. At our new Reading site 70%+ of the power entering the building actually gets to power the servers. This gives a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) figure of roughly 1.5, erring on the side of pessimism. PUE, by the way, is the Green Grid’s proposed metric on measuring data centre efficiency. In my third article in this series (“Measuring IT”), I will explain why it is not a useful metric in practical terms and why the one going into the EU Data Centre Code of Conduct (being developed with the British Computer Society’s Data Centre Specialist Group and Intellect UK) makes more sense. For simplicity though it serves its purpose here; in many older data centres, the PUE is as high as 3 or 4 (ie. Only 25-33% of the power entering the building actually reaches IT kit). I’ll talk about how data centres can be made more efficient in the next article (“How”), but for now lets apply those figures to our workhorse example servers’ power usage.

For meaningful comparison I’m going to look at the costs in any one month. For the hardware, three years is a realistic lifetime so £1,000 over 36 months gives an amortised cost of £28/month ($56/m).

The 18-month old dual Xeon, when housed in a fairly average two year old data centre (I’ll be generous and give them a PUE rating of 2), would double its power usage (cooling, UPS inefficiencies etc), which gives us a figure of 400Watts which, at 10p/KWh, gives us a electricity bill of £29/month ($58/m). Yes – that is more than the cost of the hardware!

Our new, low-power dual core machine, installed in our nice energy-efficient modern data centre (PUE 1.5) gives us a total energy bill (at 10p/KWh again) of £11/month ($22/m). In other words, by installing modern, basic servers (not expensive, over-complex blade centres) in a modern data centre (most of whose efficiency gains are achived without massive cost of complexity), you can save £600-700 ($1,200-1,400) over the lifetime of a £1,000 server!

A final thought; those figures don’t include an allowance for carbon taxation or offsetting, and one should also bear in mind that commercial electricity prices have doubled in recent years, and look set to continue to rise, at least until they are at a level where nuclear power is commercial viable again. In short, taking note of your IT infrastructure’s energy efficiency can have a very significant effect on your bottom line.

In the next installment I’ll talk about some of the simple, practical steps that can be taken to improve a data centre’s power efficiency, as well as some methods of reducing the number of machines you need in the first place.

I am ashamed to say that I failed to do any such thing with any regularity last year for a number of fairly feeble reasons, principally that the two mile journey was inconveniently uphill almost all the way which meant that by the time I got there I was tired, hot and a feeling like I needed a shower! Of course, being a bit more fit would fix the problem, but that would involve even more effort on my part, and I’m not one for taking the hard path if an alternative is available.

On the same research park as us there is a new company called Natural Discovery that offers trips around the Surrey countryside on an electric bike, the concept being that it takes the sting out of the more strenuous parts of the journey for those of us for whom Davina McCaul’s 30 minute tummy toning exercise video is a serious work out! The idea of an electric bike seemed perfect; I could get to work easily, cheaply, quickly and in an environmentally friendly manner all at the same time!

Speaking with the Natural Discovery boys I uncovered one of the hidden benefits of electric bikes; due to their eco-friendliness the revenue does not regard them as a benefit-in-kind for tax purposes, which means that Memset (my company) could buy the bikes and make them available to staff without a tax increase, as there would be with a company car for instance.

They kindly arranged a trial of their Urban Mover bikes, a mountain bike and a ladies’ town bike the latter of which I borrowed for a week. At first glance they did not look unlike normal bikes; the motor is concealed within the rear hub and the battery nestled against the vertical bar under the seat. They were noticeably heavier when pushing, but once astride they felt just like normal bikes, at least until you started to peddle. Although there is a twist-grip which just kicks in the motor, in normal operation it does not get used, so all you have to do is get on an use it like a normal bike. The difference is that once you start peddling, the bike “helps”; the motor kicking in and assisting you gently but firmly. I rapidly became accustomed to my little helper and within minutes was whizzing back and forth really quite fast (10-15mph) but with very little effort – quite delightful!

The real test was on the daily commute though. I would normally wait until 6pm to avoid the traffic, but that should not be an issue so left at 17:30. Sure enough, I was happily passing the slow-moving traffic, feeling confident enough to move out to the middle of the road and effortlessly swish past the somewhat surprised car drivers. It rapidly became apparent that I needed to be a little careful – I did seem to be surprising people by managing to pull away as fast as them, catching them up from behind and overtaking – not something they were expecting from a girl on a bike, so I tried to give myself extra space as I would when riding my motorbike. Enjoying the downhill run home I was mildly disappointed when the motor maxed out and cut off at 15mph (the legal limit for electric assistance) and I found I had run out of gears, so could not be as much of a speed-freak as I would have liked. Hardly a big problem though!

The following morning I made the same trip back, this time uphill. It was an absolute breeze; the normally arduous journey transformed into a pleasant trip. I could still make it strenuous if I wanted, and that just meant I got there really fast! In fact, on the second morning I decided to go for it a bit, and later that week gleefully received third-hand reports from car commuters who had noticed a “blonde girl hurtling along past all the traffic on bicycle with far too much ease”. It was especially fun racing with some of the uber-fit cyclists who generally did not notice the fact that it was an electric bike until at least a quater mile of hard work keeping up with me! Definitely an unexpected plus to the whole experience.

After the week’s trial I decided to buy some on the company, initially for my brother and myself. I found the riding position of the ladies’ bike a little too upright, and preferring the pseudo-mountain bike’s more usual pose opted for that one (the target="_blank">Urban Mover 36). One minor problem I had found was that the motor tended to kick in and help even when peddling very gently, for example when filtering through traffic resulting in me having to keep jumping on the brakes. In fact, when the motor system was turned on it was hard to ride slowly at all. Therefore when speccing up the new purchase I decided to spend a little extra and get bikes with torque sensors that give graded assistance depending on how hard (specifically with how much force) you are peddling. Having the torque sensor definitely helps, giving a smoother, more controlled ride while also helping to conserve the battery by avoiding unnecessary accelerating and braking.

I also opted for the more expensive lithium polymer batteries which allow me to use it for a week’s worth of commuting (20-ish miles) and some without needing a charge. The total price was not small – around £900 each – but with the tax break (which when taking NI into account is >30%) I felt it was affordable, and I expect the prices will drop in time. You can get cheaper electric bikes, but from speaking to Natural Discovery (who trialled many) I think it is worth going for the more expensive end of the market.

Despite this Summer’s hopeless weather I am now managing to cycle into work a lot more, and am feeling better for it. The eclectic assistance, while helpful, does not eliminate the need for work on the rider’s part so I am getting a bit fitter too. In terms of raw cost-benefit I doubt the bikes pay for themselves, even considering the cost of offsetting a car’s carbon emissions, but when you combine the financial benefits with the reduced peak commute time, easing parking requirements (we have 1 space for every 2 people), environmental friendliness and gently getting fit during your commute, I think the package is very worthwhile indeed.

(also published on Telegraph Earth)