Talking About Green

[An interesting aspect on the debates of solution to CO2 emissions is the cost benefit analysis of various technology approaches. As pointed out in Joseph Romm’s blog “Climate Progress” an opportunity cost benefit analysis highly favours windmills and solar thermal power (not photovoltaics) because they can be deployed quickly and start reducing CO2 emissions immediately. Nuclear power, on the hand, has a huge opportunity cost because of the long time frame it will require to deploy nuclear power plants. As a result, by taking into consideration opportunity cost-benefit analysis nuclear comes off second worst to carbon sequestration in terms of alternate energy solutions for reducing CO2 emissions.

By that same analysis I would argue that Green IT has a significant opportunity benefit even greater than windmills. We know from reports like SMART 2020 that Green IT can reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 15%. But since many of these solutions can implemented almost immediately (given sufficient incentives such as mandated carbon neutrality), the opportunity benefit may be significantly greater than the nominal 15% reduction.

As well, given the compelling cost benefit analysis of windmills, it is likely they will contribute a significant amount of baseload power, which could result in wide fluctuations in power availability. As I have pointed out in this blog before, Next Generation Internet network and grids could be readily designed to deal with this fluctuating load without resorting to backup power from batteries or diesel generators. (See my blog on follow the sun/follow the wind networks and grids). This is the mind set we need to develop as we move forward to a future zero carbon society. To date electrical power engineers assume all of their customers need the same degree of reliable power, and therefore are less than enthusiastic about most renewable energy sources because of their unreliability. Green Internet and IT can be easily designed to handle large fluctuations in the availability of renewable energy---BSA]

Joseph Romm’s blog on opportunity cost-benefit analysis
http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/14/stanford-study-part-1-wind-solar-baseload-easily-beat-nuclear-and-they-all-best-clean-coal/

World’s first demo of follow the sun/follow the wind network and grid
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2008/10/worlds-first-demo-of-follow-sunfollow.html