21st Century Regenerative Technology

1. Harnessing datacenter heat for savings
2. Event: Uptime, IT heavyweights to tackle data center power crisis
3. When does additionality matter? (Part 3)

Harnessing datacenter heat for savings

2008-04-03 11:00

Ted Samson - Energy conservation

The heat that pours out of your datacenter machinery represents a hefty chunk of your monthly utility bills. After all, were it not for that heat waste, you wouldn't be pouring dollars into running that pricey cooling equipment to ensure your valuable hardware doesn't get fried. While many vendors out there are devising CRAC hardware and cooling technologies for more efficiently and inexpensively beating the datacenter heat, some organizations are taking another tack: putting all of that hot air to valuable reuse, which can have pleasant financial and environmental benefits. Datacenters are responsible for a goodly amount of heat waste,... READ MORE

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Event: Uptime, IT heavyweights to tackle data center power crisis

2008-04-02 23:22

Ted Samson - Sustainable IT

IT energy consumption is growing at such a rapid pace that we'll need another 30 power plants in the United States alone to meet demand. That is one of the findings of a recent datacenter study by the Uptime Institute pointing to a power crisis looming on the horizon. The study revealed that "its largest datacenter members have gone from an annual energy consumption rate of 6 percent for the years 1999 to 2005, to 20 to 30 percent in each of the years 2006 and 2007." [For more on the study, read Datacenters heading for a cash crunch.] Running... READ MORE

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When does additionality matter? (Part 3)

2008-04-02 21:43

In two previous posts, I've attempted to establish that additionality is neither some strange concept relevant only to carbon offsets, nor an awkward patch used to fix a defect in the design of carbon markets. Rather, the concept of additionality is applicable to any incentive system, whether subsidy, tax, or whatever. The real question is what degree of additionality is actually necessary or desirable in any given system. Put another way, when should we care enough about additionality to incur the costs of measuring and enforcing it?

Those costs can be quite high, and the benefits sometimes uncertain. Let's return to one of my previous examples: the grocery store owner who offers coupons to lure new customers, even though most coupons will probably fall into the hands of old, non-additional customers. In this case, additionality is difficult to enforce, and the benefits of enforcement are low (because coupon programs don't cost much to run). High cost, low benefit: additionality isn't a concern.

Now the carbon offset market. Here the cost of measuring additionality is high, but the need is even higher. There are (at least) two reasons for this. The first is the obvious one: carbon offsets can be used to satisfy emission limits under a cap-and-trade program. Non-additional offsets undermine the cap. Good offset projects help to reduce the strain of carbon caps on the economy by lowering the cost of reductions. But too many bad offset projects threaten the whole system by allowing emissions to keep growing.

The second reason is more subtle, but equally important: a large proportion of potential projects are non-additional. For example, a recent McKinsey analysis suggested that 40% of the greenhouse gas reductions available to us are revenue-positive. And, of course, a lot of possible projects are just flatly unhelpful -- I routinely field questions from well-meaning people wondering if they can get offset revenue for leaving some tract of land undeveloped. If we don't test carefully, non-additional projects will soak up all the available offset financing, undermining a carbon cap and stranding the projects we want to support.

It's these two facts together that make additionality a critical component of any offset market. If the pool of possible non-additional projects were fairly small, we might not want to incur the cost of measuring additionality. Unfortunately, that pool is large, so we need to be discriminating.

Sean is right to raise questions about perverse incentives in the carbon market, but abandoning additionality is no solution. In my final post on this topic, I'll talk about the specific issue of Sean's co-gen projects, and why I think additionality isn't really the problem here at all.

Photo available under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Schwarzerkater.