Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

The Sunday Times in London caused a big news splash a week or so ago with their coverage of Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross' comments about the GHG emissions of Google searches, which apparently turned out to not be Wissner-Gross' comments, and so on and so on.

But the story got our team thinking about the carbon impact of common internet activities, and wondering about the impact of each email, YouTube, iTune, SMS text, and tweet that flies across the net. We all have day jobs, so we couldn't estimate all of them, but we had some good internal data on email so Mark Monroe led the team in an analysis of the emissions of the internet's original (warning: bad pun coming) "killer app".

We broke the email process up into 4 parts: composition, processing, and storage. This made the analysis easier and highlighted some big differences in where the carbon loads are. The other big area to look at would be transport (the energy used by switches in the network to move the bits around). That's the one area we didn't have good data, but the time involved in transit in the network is so small that we believe it is much lower than the storage or processing costs. (anyone have any data?)

For processing, we looked at the energy consumed by one of our large enterprise email systems. This system serves over 12,000 employees, processing 12.6 million emails per week. For all that work, we ended up estimating the energy per email processed at about 0.13 watt-hours, which in the US would average about 0.08 grams of COe2.

Storage was next. The same server farm has over 330 million emails stored, with an average size of 76KB and and average age of 18 month on disk. That's roughly 27,000 emails per employee, stored mostly on redundant, highly available spinning disks within the complex. When all was included, storing the average email used up another 0.36 watt-hours, or about 0.23 grams of CO2e. With storage we're now up to 0.31 grams of CO2e.

On to composition. Looking at a random sample of about 62,000 emails, we found the median number of new characters typed into an email was around 300. If the average English word is 6 characters, and the average typing speed while composing is around 19 words per minute, our typical user is spending 2.6 minutes in front of a laptop, desktop, or thin client to compose each message. We estimated the average power draw for these 3 types of devices at our company is about 66 W, so the 2.6 min of composition time would consume about 2.9 watt-hours of energy, producing 1.8 grams of CO2e (obviously it would be less if you only used thin clients, more if you only used workstation-class PCs).

Note that that's six times the amount of energy and carbon produced in the processing and storage steps. But it highlights the fact that the back end email systems are pretty efficient. It's the time sitting in front of the console that chews up the big energy. As an example, the 25 minutes it takes to compose this blog entry on my 32 watt laptop results in 8 grams of CO2e. The same pattern probably holds for Google searches, where the 0.2 seconds the search spends inside Google's data center is nothing compared to the minute or two you spend reading it on your screen and clicking through to several references.

Add up the emissions to compose, process and store a message for 18 months and it totals 2.19 grams CO2e. To put this in perspective, humans emit 0.5 grams of CO2e per minutes by through breathing, so a 2.6 minute email is 1.3 grams of CO2e from breathing. Doesn't seem like much until you consider the total volume of email is estimated at 97 billion messages per day, which turns our little puffs of CO2e into 212,000 metric Tons of CO2e per day.

If the amount of spam keeps rising, maybe this will be our "killer app"!

I wasn't surprised the article in the WSJ over the holidays which was pretty hard on Dell for its "carbon neutral" claim. There's certainly plenty of room for skepticism. There's no formal definition of "carbon neutral", and in the case of a company like Dell (or Sun or others) there's large parts of the environmental impact that fall outside the formal company boundary (e.g. supply chain, product energy usage by customers). Furthermore, as the article points out, the questions of "additionality" and whether the offset dollars are really changing behavior are not clear cut (and probably never will be, imho). Putting this all together, the skepticism wasn't a surprise.

Here's a couple of other thoughts related to the article:

• I know a number of the folks working on sustainability at Dell, and I know they've got some really good programs underway there. Personally I feel like their carbon neutrality claims have actually detracted from the communicating the good work they're doing.
• At Sun, our position has not changed. We are not attempting to be carbon neutral, nor are we dealing in offsets or RECs. We are continuing to make major investments to lower our environmental impact, both direct as well as in our supply chain and products. We have achieved over 20% reduction since 2002, and have projects underway to take that down much further.
• Remember, Dell spent a bunch of money to be able to claim to be carbon neutral. How much more headway could they have made in their other programs if they'd applied that same money?

Report: EPA 'Cow Tax' Could Charge $175 per Dairy Cow to Curb Greenhouse Gases

My question: are humans next?

Today's headline says that OPEC is likely cutting oil production by 2 million barrels/day. Doing the math, that equates to 740K metric tons of CO2e per day, or 270M tons per year.

You can pretty much read the news of the economic slowdown and see the signs of an economy-driven tail-off in global GHG emissions. Obviously we'd all much rather see the reductions coming from efficiency and greener energy, but I'm sure the atmosphere isn't complaining.

Now's the time to make changes - if we can get good practices in place, then maybe we can drive the emissions down from here instead of having to go back up to the previous highs and starting from there.

Catching up on my blogging, I wanted to add some commentary on our membership and participation in the launch of BICEP, or Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy.

In the US we spend over $1T a year on energy, so it is a major part of our economy. It seems obvious to say, but energy price and availability of energy effect the delivery of every good and service that makes up our economy.

Obviously energy efficiency measures will help the situation. They should drive down prices and ease constraints on availability. Just witness the effects in the US of a downturn in the economy - suddenly oil is below $60 a barrel again, and gas a the pump is under two dollars, based on a decrease in demand in the 5% - 6% range over 2007. If we had dropped our consumption through efficiency the same amount, we would have had the same effect.

But energy efficiency will only get us so far, and then we're going to need a supply of clean energy. Early indications from the incoming Obama administration are encouraging, signaling an interest in putting real measures in place to reduce CO2, including discussions of cap and trade systems, investment in green energy sources, etc.

So given that, why bother with BICEP? The answer is because there are lots of ways to design these programs, and the detailed decisions may lead to very different results for specific industries or the economy overall. Because of this, we, the BICEP founders, felt that it was important to give a voice to energy-using companies who will have to operate within the frameworks that are developed.

As an example, lets look at a one important decision in designing a cap and trade system. Are the credits handed out based on historic emissions, are they auctioned off, or somewhere in the middle? These choices may effect the ability for new companies to get involved, since giving credits to historic emitters creates a barrier to entry for potential low-emissions options that haven't historically emitted. They also dramatically effect the flow of money in the overall system (and remember, we're talking about big flows of money here). For example, auctioned credits bring revenue to the government that can be used for energy programs elsewhere, but builds the price into the energy economy much more like a tax.

We've only just scratched the surface of this one question, and, more importantly, this is only one question of many. The details matter here, big time.

Companies who aren't in the energy business could look at all of this, conclude that discussing legislation in another industry isn't a good idea, so decide not to participate in the discussion. And up until this year, that's the point of view we took at Sun. However, the thing that really changed my mind was the realization that Sun is already in the energy business, and so are all of our customers. Our businesses depend on the the future, ready availability of clean energy.

Because of we decided to become more active in the discussion, and selected BICEP as the primary vehicle for getting our voice heard.

Its great that we're getting top level movement, but the details will matter. We're all in the energy business to some extent, and its time to dig into the details and have a voice in how this turns out.

I got a chuckle out of this.

Environmental Leader: Want To Win Awards? Write Longer Corporate Responsibility Reports

Today we announced that we have met our original GHG reduction goal, by achieving a 23% absolute reduction below 2002 levels for the US. I'm excited and proud that we made this milestone well ahead of schedule.

As part of the announcement we also went public with our new goal of a further 20% absolute reduction of our global impact by 2015.

A couple of quick notes. First, why US only? When we set the goal we only had a decent handle on our US emissions. Obviously it would be better if this were a global result, but we've been applying the same techniques in other parts of the world (primarily OpenWork and more efficient datacenters), so I'm confident that we have seen solid improvements elsewhere as well. Also note that our new goal is global.

Second, where did the reductions come from? All of the reductions are a result of changes to operations, practices and the physical plant. Other than the makeup of the power that we get from our utilities, there were no additional purchases of greener energy. Also, there were no offsets or other onetime savings. In other words, the changes that we've done have resulted in a "permanent" reset of our energy and emissions baseline.

And, what did this cost? All of the major changes have had (or are on the way to having) a positive financial return. So while there were short term costs, sometimes in capital, sometimes in driving process change, etc, these activities have resulted in a net decrease in the cost to run Sun day in and day out. We're hoping that we can repeat that same kind of result as we meet this new goal. We have a bunch of targets that should have a good return, but we aren't quite sure we can get the full 20% that way yet.

Finally, thanks to all of the individuals and groups at Sun who helped us make this goal. Well done!

Environmental Leader today reported that "Environmental Friendliness Not Driving PC Sales" (I'd quote the original study, but getting it to read costs more than a couple of PCs).

The conclusions are not surprising: consumers are looking for hard environmental savings, not marketing. In particular, they want to see energy efficiency that leads to real economic savings. But realistically, what else would they use as a criteria? Higher use of recycled cardboard in the packaging? How does a consumer put a value on that?

Unfortunately our whole industry is not yet consistently good at giving people the energy information they need to use the one environmental criteria they seem ready to use - possible savings in the monthly power bill. While Dell highlights some eco interesting looking advancements on the front page of dell.com, I still find it very hard to get any real energy data on specific PC models. Same thing for HP. (Note: in the server space Dell, HP, Sun, and probably others have much better real power data available for most models).

The lesson here for all of is simple, in my mind. We have to explain the concrete environmental and economic benefits in a way that is meaningful to consumers, and give them the hard facts so they assign their own valuation to those benefits. It might not feel "pure" that economics is the way that most people will do that valuation, but if they make better decisions for the environment, isn't that goodness?

Environmental Leader has a good article on the report by IEA that says that $45T of investment will be required by 2050 in order to reduce CO2 by 50%. In particular, it highlights the graph which is very interesting, showing 15 of the 50% reduction coming from efficiency gains, and the next 20 of 50% coming at relatively low cost from the power sector. So combined, these two are 70% of the overall reduction, and looking at the graph, can be achieved with near net 0 cost (the efficiency savings cover the added cost of power switchover).

So what's left is a massively expensive effort to convert our industry, cars and trucks to an alternate fuel source. The conclusion of the IEA report is that we would need $500/ton tax or price of carbon to achieve the reductions required in the industry and transport sectors. But wait a minute - the power industry needs a price of carbon under $100 to meet its goals, and the efficiency gains can be met without much of a price of carbon at all. At $500/ton, we'd be looking at an additional cost for electricity of around 30 cents per kWH - are we really going to do that just because another sector is harder to deal with than electricity?

What this graph so nicely points out is that we have three different problems, and because of the economics, maybe we shouldn't treat them the same way. First, we have the need to increase our efficiency. Since this is generally cost neutral or better, this should be able to be done through some kind of incentive program. Second, we need to convert our electricity production, and there's increasing consensus that we can do this at a reasonably low cost.

Finally, our big problem is that we need to wean ourselves of our oil dependence for transportation and industrial use. For better or worse, we also appear to have a massive disconnect in supply and demand in this sector, so we are doubly incented to address this problem. And you can see by the large range of predicted cost in the graph, especially compared to the small range in the power sector, that we don't really yet know how to do this.

So I draw optimism from the left 2/3 of the chart, and am very concerned about the right third. But more importantly, I'm increasingly worried about us using carbon pricing as a big hammer that we're going to fix everything with. We have at least three distinct problems here, so maybe we should be looking at at least that many mechanisms to drive change.

The Environmental Leader reports on an analysis from Carnegie Mellon claiming that a $35 price for CO2 would results in a 10% decrease in emissions.

I haven't read the report yet, but just at the face of it I'm skeptical when I look at the impact on the pricing and usage of gasoline and electricity. First, lets do gasoline. Roughing out the math, gas produces just under 20 lbs of CO2e per gallon of gas, or 110 gallons per metric ton. So the $35/ton pricing would add $0.35 per gallon. Given the current gas prices, you'd be looking at an additional increase of less than 10%, and much less than the increase over the last 12 months.

Electricity shows a higher increase, but I'm still not sure its enough to change behavior that much. Using 1.3lbs of CO2 per KWh as a US average, that yields around 1,700 KWh per metric ton of CO2e. So a $35 price for CO2 would add about 2 cents per KWh. Average retail electricity price is around $0.10, so this would be a 20% increase in retail electricity prices, and higher for commercial electricity which tends to be lower. This is enough of an increase to cause some changes in behavior, but 10% seems like a stretch. For electricity, however, it would help with the economic case for emerging green alternatives, so would probably do some good on the generation mix side over time.

So when I read the report I'll find out how they get there, but I'm very doubtful for gasoline and transportation, and mildly skeptical for electricity usage at $35/ton. This analysis definitely makes one thing clear: at CO2 prices below $5/ton, there will be no change in behavior.

Two different articles this week both struck the same set of nerves.

"ROHS – More harm than good?" looks at the unforeseen side effects of the EU RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) directive, especially as it applies to the use of lead in solder to manufacture computers. (Clarification: the 7% increase cited in energy usage applies to the solder applciation process, not to the computer itself as the article implies. The net effect on the computer is very small.) "The Clean Energy Scam" looks at the unforeseen effects of biofuels and goes a step farther, calling the whole thing an intentional deception of the world's population.

These articles raise a number of key points for me.

First, I've written before about the lack of magic answers, as much as we'd all love to find them. When you take any societal-scale process or product and think you've found a totally clean, side effect free, economically viable substitute for it, you're almost surely delusional. Any substitution will have other, new side effects, and we absolutely need to try to be accounting for them. (more on this below)

Second, we've got to avoid painting products and processes as "bad" or "good". Biofuels are only a scam if you believed that they didn't have any negative side effects. Everything is somewhere in the middle, its only a matter of degrees. Probably the classic case of the effect of this black-or-white mentality is nuclear power. Is it the answer to all of our energy problems? No, but it might be part of the answer. Unfortunately it got such a bad name that we stopped most of our work on it in the US, so we've lost decades of potential advancements that may have been significant.

Third, a common reaction to these scenarios is "well, only if only someone had done a complete life-cycle analysis and factored in all of the externalities, we would have known all of this ahead of time". The concept is fine and in the right direction, but there's a number of issues: 1) these analyses are amazingly complex, and we currently lack the tools to accurately do them for all but the most trivial products, 2) its very hard to factor in behavior changes by consumers, and 3) there's a core moral and societal question of the relative cost/value of these externalities. Which is worse: lead-based solder in landfills, or 7% more energy use in the solder process?

Finally, we need to be careful about passing judgement on new technologies. I believe that biofuels are going to play an important part in our long-term energy map. I also believe that those biofuels are going to be much different than the ones we are producing today. Decades of ingenuity have gone into the infrastructure, systems, cars, generators, etc that we have today. We need to let some of these new technologies mature before we pass judgement on them. Some of them may never mature, and some may look pretty bad for awhile before they do, but at this point I don't think we're in a strong enough position to be discounting any idea.

Summary:

• There are no effect-free solutions. We need to guesstimate the effects of all potential solutions, measure their real effects if we put them into practice, and compare alternatives to the best of our collective ability.
• We cannot afford to paint things black or white. We need to be able to differentiate a wide range of shades of green, and be willing to give new technologies some extra slack.

A couple of quick items of note from Environmental Leader over the last week.

First, Thin Clients Trump PCs On Energy Consumption provides some real-world data on the energy advantages of thin client architectures. We've seen benefits in management overhead and security also, but more and more companies are exploring the energy benefits and getting results. I often find that people aren't aware of our thin client SunRay products or virtual desktop offerings, but these savings are real, so check 'em out if you haven't already done so.

Second, Alliance For Climate Protection Launches $300M Marketing Push talks about the launch of the new program by the Alliance for Climate Protection, and their new website wecansolveit.org. $300M for advertising to raise awareness? Man, that's a lot of money. I really find it hard to believe that's the most effective thing we can do today for the environment with $300M, but, hey, its not my dough so who am I to say.

Haven't blogged a lot this year, but there's been a good reason. In late December Jonathan called me and asked me to take the lead on the MySQL integration. You might be wondering why the VP of Eco Responsibility got tapped for this, but its not that surprising. When singular events occur in the company, such as the $1B purchase of an open source icon, we need to tap resources from all over to cover all of the work that's required.

And in some ways, I suppose I was a logical pick. My Eco job has me working with execs and groups across the company, so building on those relationships to make MySQL an integral part of Sun makes sense. Furthermore, I've got an awesome team driving our Eco agenda, so we've been able to keep our momentum up on that front even with my attention being split for a while.

I probably won't write much about my MySQL work here, but I wanted to spend some time on it today since its a key milestone, the public closing of the deal. There's tons of excitement on both sides as we reach this milestone. There's a lot to do yet, but we finally get to sit down and start doing real work together, which is what everyone's been waiting for.

With the close a number of issues are wrapped up, but a bunch of things can only now get started for real. So I'll probably still be somewhat spotty with my blogging for the next month or two, but I've been accumulating things to talk about, so watch this space.

I had to laugh at this blog in Information Week titled "Going Green Merits Yellow Light". I see this every once in awhile - people so caught up in the green aspects of a product that the "goodness" of the energy savings or lower impact spills over distorts their perspective. In this case the energy efficiency was somehow supposed to have made up for the fact that it was designed by a small company who apparently had some serious engineering (and, ultimately, business) issues.

For procurement, supply chains, vendor selection, etc, environmental responsibility has to be an 'AND', not an 'IN PLACE OF'. Make sure that as your teams increase their focus on eco, they don't forget the stuff that they're already good at, like evaluating product reliability, vendor's financial viability and product fit. If a supplier can't meet your volume needs, all of the green-ness in the world won't help meet customer demands.

But you can also go a step farther and get proactive. Take your best suppliers and vendors today and tell them where you need them to be in a few years. Maybe you're a little ahead of them in thinking about green strategy. Maybe they're putting their green emphasis somewhere that's not as useful to you.

From our customers we're getting more and more eco hurdles to clear in RFPs, but they're all about what we're doing today. Let's talk about datacenters 5 years from now and what you think you'll need. If you're trying to have that discussion with us and we're not listening, send me an email directly. We've got plans, but I want to make sure they're what you need. I'd hate to miss the mark and cause our customers to have to go buy exploding computers from some fly-by-night startup....