Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

If you get a chance, read Two Steps Forward: The Six Sins of Greenwashing by Joel Makower. It is the other side of my recent post on the rights of consumers.

These are two sides of the same discussion for the following reason: most of these eco product claims are failing because they are trying to give consumers the answer, instead of the data. Instead of saying "Here's the data on the impact of this product", they want to jump to the conclusion, saying "This product is green. Believe us, if you could see the data you'd agree."

Programs like Energy Star have been successful and effective in trying to simplify complex stories in order to help customers make better decisions. These types of summaries, when done right, can be useful and effective. We can't stop there and think that that's enough, though. Only when we provide open, accurate data on all of environmental aspects of products will we get the kind of green procurement and consumer behavior that we really need.

You're aware of our climate challenges, you're not super rich, and you're out looking for a new car. Its a pretty safe bet that you're taking a look at the stickers on the car windows that tell you how many miles per gallon you might get. In the US there's two numbers, 'city' and 'highway', but you have a good sense of your driving patterns so you know how to weigh these numbers in your decision. And the good thing is that there's a double win - a more efficient car lowers your environmental impact and you'll save some cash in the process.

Next on your shopping list is a computer. Maybe you're buying a server for your company or a PC for home. There's already lots of eco rating schemes (almost all for PCs): Energy Star, 80 Plus, EPEAT and now Climate Savers Computing. With all of these rating systems, it must be easy to find out how much power a new PC will actually use, right? Turns out that the answer is no.

And not only is it difficult to find real power numbers for desktops, but also for servers as well. Not only does this make it harder to make good purchasing decisions, but it makes it hard to accurately size the cooling and power distribution in the datacenter, so people add in fudge factors and guess high to be safe. Unfortunately, datacenter infrastructure runs less efficient at lower utilization, so not only are people buying more than they need, but what they get isn't as efficient as it could be.

I've heard a couple of arguments about why this data isn't available. The first is that the power varies by application. That's true for cars as well, and the answer there is to provide more than one datapoint and let customers extrapolate their own experience. This seems reasonable for computers as well, and the success of server performance benchmarks is another good sign. The second is that the power varies by utilization. Again, I think that customers can deal with the data - lets give it to them.

The last two are that a) there's no standards, and b) configuration options make it too complex. We agree that standards would be great, and there's good progress on that front, but we don't believe that there's a need to wait. Our strategy is to put out power calculators that help people compute the expected power of specific configurations, which helps deal with challenge (b) above. When standards emerge, we'll adapt our processes and data to be aligned with those.

At this point we've got calculators out for some of our higher volume products, and are in the process of working our way through the whole product line. For example, check out the calculator for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server or the Intel-based Sun Fire x4150. We don't have full utilization graphs yet, but those will start to be available at some point as well.

We believe that with our customers facing numerous energy challenges, ranging from practical power and cooling issues to economic issues to environmental issues, they deserve to have an accurate estimate of how much power the products that they buy will use. We are committed to providing that data, and to supporting processes to standardize that data.

Take a look at what we're doing today and give us some feedback.

I was tongue-in-cheek when I originally wrote about the idea, but Fiji water has made it a reality!

I'm not sure if I like their name ("carbon negative") or mine ("double carbon neutral") better.

So, what's better for the environment - drinking "carbon negative" water that's bottled in Fiji and shipped to your store in plastic bottles, or drinking "carbon positive" tap water? You make the call....

I had some time blocked off this morning to finish off a post I've been working on about energy measurement, when IBM got me so confused with their announcement on Friday that I had to put my other project aside (there's also a video here if you're interested).

The announcement starts off simple enough: a) there are lots of opportunities to save energy and money in datacenters, b) customers want to validate that they're actually saving energy. This makes sense. We're seeing the same opportunities in our datacenters and in our customer's datacenters, and we all want to make sure the savings are real.

The next step is where it gets confusing. Most of the people I know are having good luck reading monitoring their equipment, reading their electric meters and looking at their power bills to verify that they are in fact saving energy. But for some reason, IBM says that's not enough. What you really need is an "IBM Efficiency Credit Certificate", which are based on the relatively obscure concept of Energy Efficiency Certificates, which are the lesser known cousin of Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs. And to do these, IBM has partnered with a (tiny?) company called Neuwing Energy, LLC.

Basically it appears that when you finish a project you pay Neuwing some money, which they turn around and pay to one of their verifiers (see their website), who then verify your efficiency gains. In exchange you get a certificate saying what you saved. In theory there is a market that you could sell or auction these certs off at, but after a couple of hours on the web I've been able to find out almost nothing. The presentation on Neuwing's site says that the power companies in three states are required to deal in these, but there's no evidence of a functioning market. Note that EECs are neither required nor sufficient to trade on the Chicago Climate Exchange, which is as close to a real efficiency market as we have in this country today. Nor are these required to report to EPA Climate Leaders or the Carbon Disclosure Project.

So I get the theoretical concept of EECs, though I'm unclear on the practical issues of their value and how you sell them. If you don't plan to monetize them, it seems like a waste of time and money - there's a lot easier ways to understand your energy savings than paying Neuwing. But that leaves me with some questions for IBM:

Does IBM endorse EECs as a full-blown public climate policy? Are they lobbying in Washington and in state houses across the country for a system based on EECs, as opposed to carbon cap-and-trade, carbon taxes or other market-based policies? Whether they wanted to or not, their announcement has brought this obscure cert to the forefront, and they're telling their customers that they should be paying for these things. Is this what they really want to happen?

These things are so obscure that there's lots of opportunity for misunderstanding, confusion and claims of greenwashing (just ask Whole Foods about their REC program). Is IBM really so convinced that EEC's are good environmental policy and good for their customers that they are staking their green credibility on it?

Finally, these questions aren't all rhetorical. I'd appreciate some real data on EECs, and if IBM or someone else with a datacenter has actually acquired some and sold them, I'd be interested in how it works and how much they were worth relative to the energy savings. Maybe this is the future and IBM's just out ahead of everyone else. Or maybe it isn't.