The site, which houses the IT infrastructure of almost 500 major international organisations, will now purchase 100% of its energy from UK renewable energy provider, SmartestEnergy.

According to Telehouse, SmartestEnergy buys energy from independent generators from around the country and supplies it to its customers.

The move, according to Tokuji Mitsui, managing director of Telehouse and KDDI Europe, is part of the firm’s strategy to go green.

“The biggest challenge we face at Telehouse is to improve our energy efficiency and reduce our carbon footprint, and in order to support this challenge Telehouse has worked closely with industry leading partners and regulators. We are committed to our environmental responsibilities and continue to work to align our business strategy with our green ethics wherever possible,” he said.

“The majority of electricity supplied to us is utilised by our clients, therefore it is integral that we take on initiatives such as the 100 per cent green energy supply, which in turn benefits our customer’s credentials by reducing their carbon footprint. We intend to roll out this green partnership initiative with SmartestEnergy to all our European sites in the near future.”

What is unclear however is whether the decision to go with renewable energy will cost Telehouse any more than its current cost base, or whether any extra cost will be passed on to its customers.

One of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of renewable energy is the cost, since it typically costs more than conventional grid power. This, according to most industry experts, make renewable energy for large facilities like data centres economical infeasible unless government subsidies are involved – see our story on NTT America’s deployment of renewable energy systems at its California data centre.

Obviously, the press release can be interpreted in another way. Telehouse can source all its energy from SmartestEnergy for its own systems, but leave the choice to its customers to select its own source of power. In face the release makes clear that Telehouse London are awarded the Carbon Trust Standard, which certifies that organisations have measured, managed and reduced its carbon emissions across its OWN operations. It says nothing of the energy source that is used to power the equipment of its customers.

On the other hand, by connected to SmartestEnergy, Telehouse now have the ability to offer its customers access to renewables as well, if it is not doing so already. In fact, many data centre operators and managed hosting providers offer some kind of service for its customers to go greener, including more efficient equipment, renewable energy power, and so on.

“We’ve reached a point in our engineering projects where we’re facing new challenges related to our solar receiver design,” Google wrote in its blog. “At this point, other institutions seem better positioned than Google to take this work to the next level.”

However, all is not loss. True to its originally philosophy of trying to stimulate the renewable energy market, Google will make all that it has learned through the Initiative, namely research into technologies for solar power towers – a system that focuses a field of mirrors on a solar receiver on top of tower, which then captures that heat and turns it into electricity, available to the rest of the industry.

Here’s a video of the Heliostat project

<iframe width=”450″ height=”259″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/C_oRDBda73U” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here’s what Google has learned and is sharing in its own words:

• Smarter controls: In the past, the focus has been on making strong heliostat structures. We learned that using lower cost materials and smarter software controls can generate better performance at a lower cost. This ends up lowering the overall cost of the concentrating solar power system.
• The Brayton engine: Concentrating solar power plants traditionally use significant quantities of water for cooling. This poses a challenge to scaling these technologies, especially in the desert. Our research shows that using a “Brayton engine” — a jet engine that uses solar energy to heat air and does not require spray cooling with water — significantly reduces water use and may reduce operating costs as well.
• A systems approach: We took a system level approach to designing concentrating solar systems. By focusing on the cost and quality of the system as a whole, we tried to make cutbacks on some components, while compensating elsewhere to maintain performance. We believe this approach could reduce the cost of electricity generated by concentrating solar systems, rather than attempting to optimize each individual component, which can drive up overall costs.

A pilot program conducted at Microsoft’s Seattle campus has shown that intelligent building solutions using cloud-based software can be achieved with 10% of a building’s annual energy expenditure, offering a ROI period of 18 months.

The program was implemented in 13 of Microsoft’s 118 buildings on its campus, and carried out by Microsoft, Accenture and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
According to a white paper published by the firms on the results of the pilot, the system added an analytical layer on top of existing building management systems, to improve efficiencies in fault detection, alarm management, and energy management. The system works by allowing building engineers to quickly identify problems and potential glitches instead of being reactive, while allow them to optimise performance and define usage and load parameters over time.

The result is savings in the range of several million US dollars, the white paper said.

“What we learned from the pilot program (and which is detailed in the paper) is that we at Microsoft (and by extension, many organizations with real estate portfolios) don’t need to undertake capital-intensive retrofits to cut building energy costs,” wrote Josh Henretig in the official blog from Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability team. “Instead, we saw buildings become dramatically more efficient by introducing software to harness and utilize the building systems already in use. By integrating powerful analytics that add intelligence to existing building infrastructure, our buildings got smarter, more efficient and less costly to operate.”

Excepts from the paper:

In its initial stage, the program addresses energy consumption and cost in three specific ways:

• Fault detection and diagnosis to enable timely and targeted interventions in cases of faulty or under-performing building equipment.

• Alarm management to prioritize the many notifications generated by existing building systems and point engineers to the most impactful issues.

• Energy management through systematic tracking and optimization of building energy consumption and performance over time, while changing the behavior of building occupants with visual dashboards and benchmarks.

How can others replicate this:

Microsoft’s pilot program demonstrates how corporate real estate organizations can collaborate successfully with IT, putting smart building technology to use in cutting costs and securing environmental benefits. Its experience has helped define a set of key design principles that can be used in any such rollout. These are outlined in more detail in this report, in summary they include:

• Identify, collect and aggregate relevant data: This involves setting up automated aggregation of building, weather, utility and organizational data from building systems and other sources to feed into the smart building solution. Cloud computing, combined with on-site building management technology, can provide a powerful platform to gather, store, exchange, and process diverse datasets in a secure and scalable way.

• Employ industry-leading analytics to identify savings: The core of the smart building solution is the analytics engine consisting of rules and algorithms that identify and prioritize interventions to maximize savings. Vendors differ in their approaches
and capabilities and should thus be evaluated thoroughly.

• Present results in a consumable and actionable form: The user experience needs to strike the right balance between ease of use and flexibility. Solutions need to improve
an engineer’s day-to-day productivity with better real-time information and access to data, while also providing a strong toolset for deeper analysis.

• Centralize monitoring operations: A centralized operations center can effectively monitor building conditions across a campus or multi-site portfolio and communicate directly with building engineers.

• Engage the organization: Greater awareness of energy use and benchmarks, displayed via dashboards on the intranet or in hallways, can encourage employees and business leaders to save energy, reducing overall demand.

• Avoid disruptive change: Existing building management systems do not need to be replaced. By deploying an analytics layer on top of these systems, prior investments can be significantly enhanced with minimal capital expenditure. Engineers can adopt new tools while still working directly with more familiar systems. Strong cross- organizational project management and a tailored change management approach are key to success.

Services are available from the company’s 18-hectacre campus in Kelfavik, Iceland, a location with key operating advantages that providers well over 50% cost savings over traditional data centres in Europe or New York, the company said.

The company also announced its first customer, Datapipe and its principle supplier, Colt Data Centre Services, a producer of modular data centres.

Verne Global’s commercial launch marks the first realisation of what has become a key marketing pitch for the Icelandic government – green data centres.

According to Verne Global, its facility is 100% carbon neutral, drawing power from Iceland’s dual-sourced renewable energy power grid and utilising Iceland’s ambient temperatures to provide free cooling.

“The demand for high capacity, flexible and scalable data centre campuses has increased in parallel with the growing concern of rising cost and environmental impact of traditional data centres,” said Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global. “We have designed a flexible, dynamic solution that answers the need for both high capacity computing and cost management.”

Another benefit of being in Iceland is that Verne Global not only has access to power and space, but plenty of it. The company says that the new facility will basically be able to support “almost any data centre power requirement, from racks to megawatts.”

The abundance of power available on the Verne Global campus, combined with it being 100% renewable is unique to the colocation industry.

Verne Global says it has selected Colt’s modular data centre solution, which is customised to offer chillerless cooling. The design allows Verne Global to gain rapid entry into the colocation business.

“Power remains one of the primary concerns for corporate IT managers as they evaluate their data centre needs and options going forward in terms of availability, cost and environmental impact,” said Katie Broderick, Senior Research Analyst, Servers and Datacenters, IDC. “Renewable power will continue to play an important role and, as the market evolves, Verne Global’s ability to source an abundant supply, coupled with the added benefit of free cooling, will present a compelling availability, cost and environmental advantage in the marketplace for companies looking to expand their data centre operations.”

The facility will be fitted out with a solution from Colt Data Centre Services (unrelated to Colt Telecom), which makes modular data centre equipment. According to Colt, it is shipping 500 square metres of capacity to Verne Global.

Datapipe is first customer

Verne Global also announced that managed services and infrastructure provider, Datapipe, has signed on as one of its first customers.

Datapipe says that Iceland’s location between the two largest financial markets in the world, London and New York, allows it to offer strategic services, such as disaster recovery, business continuity and cloud computing solutions.

“Verne Global has engineered an environmentally sustainable data centre that will enable Datapipe to expand into a new market while continuing our environmental leadership,” said Robb Allen, CEO of Datapipe. “Power and cooling efficiencies combined with the strategic geographic location will provide our clients with an option for carbon neutral, enterprise ready IT services and a 100% green cloud.”

The sugarcane used is this plant plastic is a rapidly renewable agricultural crop and replaces nearly a third of the fossil fuels traditionally used in this accessory packaging with material made from plants.

The adoption of the new plastic is part of AT&T’s broader overall commitment to minimize its environmental impact. In March of 2010 the company announced its plans to slim down their accessory packaging; in 2010 and 2011, the company eliminated the use of over 500 tons of paper and plastic in that packaging.

The new packaging is expected to hit AT&T stores by 2 October 2011.

“As a company we are committed to minimizing our own environmental impact, and we see the introduction of this plant-based plastic as an important step in the right direction,” said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president for devices, AT&T. “We are excited to be the first U.S. telecom company to use this plastic in our packaging and we hope other companies will join us in finding ways to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. We are actively working with our accessory suppliers to incorporate both less packaging and more sustainable plastic and paper.”

The first ever ITU Green Standards Week, head in early September, held a particular emphasis on a globalised methodology for assessing the environmental impact of ICTs globally.

“ITU has been working with industry and government members aiming to achieve agreement on an internationally recognized set of methodologies to be approved by the end of the year. Included is a methodology which ICT companies can use to measure their own carbon footprint, as well as a way to estimate the considerable savings in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy that can be achieved in other sectors through the use of ICTs,” ITU said. “A single global methodology will give credibility to the various claims currently being made about the benefits of ICTs in addressing climate change and energy issues.”

Other topics discussed at the event include reducing e-waste and the use of submarine cables for climate change monitoring and disaster warning.

Green Standards Week, jointly organized by ITU and the Italian Ministry for Economic Development, and hosted by Telecom Italia, took place in Rome 5 to 9 September 2011. The event was also supported by Huawei, Research In Motion, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, VRM Italy and Microsoft. The goal was to raise awareness on the role of ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and in particular how standards can help to achieve this.

The body of the talks comprised three workshops: Methodologies for Environmental Impact Assessment of ICT, jointly organized with the European Commission; and Moving to a Green Economy through ICT Standards, jointly organized with Telecom Italia. The third workshop, Submarine Cables for Ocean/Climate Monitoring and Disaster Warning: Science, Engineering, Business and Law was organized with WMO and UNESCO and proposed the use of submarine communication cables for ocean and climate monitoring and disaster warning. For more information, see ITU’s Technology Watch report. Workshop participants called on ITU, UNESCO and WMO to establish and coordinate a joint task force composed of world renowned experts from science, engineering, business and law to intensify study on the use of submarine networks and to explore engineering and business potential in this realm.

The annual ranking of publicly-listed companies based on their investment return and sustainable performance combines evaluations from the Dow Jones Global Total Stock Market and corporate sustainability assessment conducted by sustainability investing firm, SAM.

In addition to laying out the leaders in corporate sustainability, SAM also identifies the leaders of 19 “Supersectors,’ which represents a higher level categorisation of the 57 standard sectors identified by the Index.

KT Corp. was named the 2011 leader for the Telecommunications Supersector, which includes the sectors, mobile telecoms and fixed line telecoms.

“The company’s outperformance in the environmental dimension derives from its comprehensive strategy to address the implications of climate change and its well-developed environmental resource management,” a DJSI profile of the company noted. “KT Corp. has shown a well-defined brand strategy in the economic dimension by comprehensively incorporating its stakeholders’ brand perception in the management process. Moreover, it has enhanced its efficiency regarding capital expenditure and has achieved repeated excellent performance in risk and crisis management and privacy protection. KT Corp. recognizes the value of its human capital through an advanced management system. The company takes responsibility for the social impacts of telecommunication services and proactively engages with stakeholders regarding issues of their concern.”

Fellow Korean firm, Samsung Electronics was named the leader in the Technology Supersector, which includes the software, computer services & Internet, communication technology, semiconductors, computer hardware & electronic office equipment.

“Samsung Electronics’ policy to put sustainability at the heart of all its operations earned it the position of technology industry’s sustainability leader for the year 2011. Sustainable innovation is promoted across all business units by using an eco-design process and an Eco Rating System,” according to SAM Research. “The company has formed Councils focusing on initiatives such as eco-products development, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, water quality control and waste management. Product resource efficiency is promoted through global take-back and recycling programs. Samsung strives to keep a responsible supply chain and has an Eco Partner Certification Scheme. It evaluates suppliers’ environmental management systems and also checks for the use of restricted hazardous substances in parts and raw materials. In 2011, the company announced the “Samsung Eco-Management Vision 2020”, which includes an investment plan of KRW 23 trillion in green businesses including solar cells, rechargeable batteries for vehicles, smart grids, and geothermal heating/cooling units by the year 2020.”

HP out, Schneider Electric in

The latest review of the DJSI was released this month and saw 41 new companies added to, and 23 firms deleted from, the Index.

New additions in the tech sector include energy management and systems company, Schneider Electric. On the other side of the coin, tech-giant HP will be deleted from the Index. DJSI did not explain why HP will be removed from the list.

“In spite of the current economic turmoil, it’s clear that sustainability remains a high priority on corporate and investor agendas,” said Michael Baldinger, CEO at SAM. “Through the DJSI, we are pleased to provide access to a benchmark that offers investors exposure to sustainability leaders in each sector around the world, while also enabling them to create innovative passive and structured products.”

According to Google, it recorded a total of 1,457,982 metric tons of CO2 equivalent for the year 2010. This includes 11,126 metric tons of CO2e for direct emissions (Scope 1) from cars, company shuttles, onsite fuel consumption at its offices, 1,226,350 metric tons of CO2e of emissions from purchased electricity (Scope 2), and 207,065 metric tons of CO2e from other indirect emissions (Scope 3) such as business travel, commuting, manufacturing its servers, building its data centres, and consumption by leased premises. The overall figure also includes 13,441 metric tons of CO2e from a new category – Biogenic emissions, from landfill gas combustions.

Overall, that equals about 1.46 kg of CO2e per user (employee) on an annual basis, Google said. Google adds that without its energy efficiency measures at its data centres, its footprint would have been “about twice as big.”

In addition to the overview of its carbon footprint, Google also gave further details of the energy profile and performance of specific areas of operations.

For example, it says that its data centres now use only 50% of the energy of most other data centres. This, Google says, saves it “millions of dollars in energy costs and cuts our impact on the environment.”

And the savings don’t stop there because Google also buys carbon offsets, in addition to buying and generating renewable energy (30% of Google’s energy in the year 2010 are from renewable sources), so any amount of energy saved, and carbon avoided, also means it needs to buy less carbon offsets to achieve its carbon neutral status.

Another interesting figure from Google is what percentage of global electricity its data centres consume. Based on a study by Standford consulting professor Jonathan Koomey, who estimates the global data centre energy consumption at between 1.1% to 1.5% of the global electricity consumption, Google says that its figures equal only about 1% of the Koomey figure. So 1% of 1.3% (as the average of the Koomey estimate) puts Google’s data centre electricity consumption at 0.01% of the global total, the company said.

CO2 and web searches

Now for the fun part. As part of its carbon disclosure, Google also revealed a very interesting fact – that each 100 web query uses up about 20 grams of CO2. That, according to Google, equals about the same energy as operating a 30W laptop for an hour, keeping a 60W light bulb on for 28 minutes, or the energy needed to produce 1.5 tablespoons of orange juice.

With that figure however, we can now estimated how much CO2 we all use for web searches on a daily, or annual basis.

My calculations as follows:

- 100 searches = 20 g CO2

- Google searches in June 2011 (comScore) = 11.1bn

- 11.1/30 days = 370m Google searches/day

- 370m/100 x 20g = 74 million grams, or 74 metric tons

- 74 metric tons x 365 = 27,010 metric tons a year from Google searches.

So there you have it. The world generates about 74 metric tons of CO2 per day conducting Google searches. On an annual basis, that’s 27,010 metric tons, or roughly one fifth of the CO2 from Google’s purchased electricity.

Applied the same formula to comScore’s total number of web searches in June 2011, and the result is 112 metrics of CO2 per day, or some 40,880 metric tons of CO2 every year.

So what does 40,880 metric tons of CO2 mean?

According to the EPA, that equals the same emissions from about 7,000 passenger cars in a year, about 4 million gallons of gas, and about the same amount of CO2 needed to generate electricity to power 4,500 homes in the US for a year.

Obviously, the figure doesn’t include the energy used by the PCs and increasingly mobile devices that are doing the searching. While coming up with a realistic CO2 profile of the Web is nearly impossible at this point, at least we know have a pretty good idea of the energy profile of one of the more popular components.

Lastly, Google also revealed the CO2 profile of YouTube – 1 minute = 0.1 g, or 3 kg over 3 days. Anyone want to calculate how much CO2 we all use watching videos?

According to Google, when compared to on-site email server installations, Gmail now offers significant energy, thus carbon, savings.

“We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email,” the company said in a post on Google’s official blog. “This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centres that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.”

The comparison makes some general assumptions, such as the average number and type of servers deployed for different sized corporations, typical operating requirements, as well as the energy profiles of locally hosted server rooms and data centres.

The size of businesses are defined as follow:

Typical installations by these businesses are also assumed to include backup servers, redundant storage, and backup network links. The energy required for the passive infrastructures such as racks, UPS, cooling and so on, are also taken into account as PUE, or power usage effectiveness.

For the comparison, Google estimated that the average PUE for today’s data centres at 1.8 (medium business), with smaller business installations at 2.5, and larger businesses and bigger facilities given the ability to drive that down to 1.6.

Lastly, Google also highlights additional energy savings from cloud-based Gmail, including the fact it offers better overall resource utilisation because its pool of servers are used by multiple businesses, thus better provisioned for peak demand – as illustrated below:

On top of that, Google says that its infrastructure is also highly customised for efficiency, including specially designed servers for cloud operations, customised, high efficiency power suppliers, and custom-built software that “is designed to perform with maximum efficiency on the servers we develop without bloated additional features.”

All those factors now give Google’s infrastructure a PUE figure of 1.16.

“Optimizing the entire process of storing, hosting and serving email means that Gmail requires less than 250 mW per user,” Google said. “Over the course of a year, that’s just a bit more than 2 kWh of energy, or about $0.22 per user per year, representing significant savings over the locally hosted alternatives…”

Here’s what Google’s metrics look like in comparison to locally hosted systems:

Carbon savings

In terms of the amount of carbon emissions, the footprint of a Gmail user is about 1/80 of a user on a locally hosted system inside a small businesses, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s average emission intensity for locally-hosted email servers, the report said.

In actual numbers, a Gmail user will generate less than 1.23 kg of CO on an annual basis, compared to 4.1 kg per user for large businesses, 16.7 kg per user for medium businesses, and a whopping 103 kg per user for small business sites.

Needless to say, the same comparison can probably be applied to other cloud-based application delivery models. Obviously, Google’s impressive innovations on the hardware and infrastructure side give the company an additional edge, but many of benefits highlighted by the study, such as the efficiency benefits of scale in running data centres and higher utilisation rates as a result of shared resource pools, can be applied to any cloud environment.

Earlier this month, Dell launched its first infrastructure-as-a-service offering at VMworld, thus offering its customers the option to buy server capacity from the Dell Cloud, instead of actually buying the equipment and installing them by themselves.

A lot of thought has gone into Dell Cloud. For example, customers can acquire their server resources on a pay-as-you-go, reserved, or dedicated basis, effectively giving corporations the flexibility to either source new requirements from Dell as needed, or, in the case of dedicated servers, build a private cloud inside Dell’s facility.

At the same time, Dell’s partnership with VMware also means that applications running inside corporate environments – as long as they are running on VMware’s vSphere and vBlock platforms – can be ported back and forth to create a seamless compute environment. Dell is also preparing cloud offerings on Microsoft’s Windows Azure, as well as OpenStack platforms for the same purpose.

The move basically turns Dell’s traditional business model on its head. Instead of shifting boxes, it is now selling compute cycles. Obviously, the industry as a whole will benefit from the carbon savings of cloud computing. For Dell however, it means it will now be running those servers, and the energy consumed will now register in Dell’s carbon footprint.

So it should come as no surprise that Trisa Thompson, vice president, Corporate Responsibility at Dell, is looking to update the company’s environmental strategy.

“Dell has evolved into a comprehensive technology services and solutions provider. Our organization and capabilities are growing, organically and via acquisitions. Our customers’ needs are evolving too, and we recently announced the building of new data centres around the world to meet their growing IT needs,” she said. “Sustainability priorities and goals we defined several years ago are no longer necessarily the right ones. We are in the process of updating our environmental strategy to reflect Dell’s new business dimensions, and we will be sharing new plans and objectives throughout the coming year.”

Dell’s situation highlights an area that has so far received little attention. As telecoms operators and service providers introduce more and more cloud-based infrastructure and services, very few has actually discussed how they would measure and manage their environmental footprint as they take on their customer’s energy consumption. This will become a more critical factor as government legislation, such as Australia’s recently launched carbon tax law, emerges to put a monetary value [penalties] on corporate emissions.

As of this year, Dell is still focused on its existing environmental strategy, which aims to drive efficiency in five distinct areas – designing, building, shipping, operating, and recycling.

For 2011, the company reported 34,115 metric tons of direct emissions (Scope 1), 404,791 metric tons of indirect emissions (Scope 2), and 112,679 metric tons of emissions from global air travel (Scope 3), according to its 2011 Corporate Responsibility report. While all three figures are higher than the previous two years, Dell’s carbon intensity, calculated as metric tons/million $ revenue came in at 7.14, which beat out last year’s figure of 7.43.