FOLLOWING my recent article on efforts in the ISP industry to become “green”, Mark Newton from Internode has kindly taken the time to answer some questions about what steps they’re taking.

In the previous article sustainable settlements designer Mike Stasse raised concerns that people might be buying carbon credits and using green power simply to “cut out the guilt”. He raised the point that there isn’t enough ‘green power’ to go around, and that a lot of it is still sourced from fossil fuels.

I started by asking Mark about his opinions on ISP’s impact on the environment and the action they should be taking to minimise it.

Mark Newton: I think it’s a bit mixed.  Like virtually everything in the environmental debate, there’s nuance layered upon nuance. Do ISP datacentres use a lot of power?  Absolutely.  But the resources hosted in those datacentres are resources which, in the absence of the datacentre, would be scattered around the rest of the business world. Businesses don’t just invent new servers because a datacentre exists. ‘We consume the power so that you don’t have to.’

The other thing a large datacentre presents is the opportunity to replace entire servers with large-scale virtualisation.  Why consume kilowatts to keep 50 servers ticking over spending most of their lives idle when you can run one server with 50 virtualised instances? Systems like that run at power densities (kW per rack) which tend to need lots of care and feeding, which more or less mandates putting them in a datacentre.

Michael Purse: What measures has Internode taken with regards to green power and carbon offsetting and what are Internode’s goals in regards to this?

Mark Newton: Internode has analysed its power utilization in conjunction with environmental consultants, Carbon Planet. The result of that process has been to buy 100% green power from our electrical utilities, and to buy certified carbon credits to offset the CO2 impact that the non-electrical parts of the business generate (e.g. vehicles). The green power purchase provides our power utilities with funding to stand-up wind turbines, geothermal, solar, and whatever other emission-free technology they choose to use to generate power. Our aim is to minimize our environmental impact company-wide.

Michael Purse: Do you believe these are actually useful and have any effect?

Mark Newton: Certainly.  The power industry has a profit incentive to meet its contracts in the cheapest way possible. If you strike a deal with them which features a contract term which says they need to emit no CO2 to deliver your power, then they need to emit no CO2 to deliver you power.

If you don’t negotiate such a term, they’ll use the cheapest, dirtiest method possible to deliver kWh to your premises. Over time I expect that the cost premium paid for green power will diminish, as carbon trading puts a price on pollution and makes the dirty power generation methods more expensive. They probably don’t have to get that much more expensive before green systems are cheaper, so I suspect there’s a tipping point somewhere in there that we haven’t reached yet.

In the meantime, an environmentally aware company can stimulate the green power industry by choosing to direct its expenditure towards green options, which is what we’ve done.

Michael Purse: Do you have any other comments with regards to environmental concerns and what we should be looking at to try and cut our impact on the environment?

Mark Newton: There is a wealth of new technologies to improve the efficiencies of cooling systems out there. That’s a big deal, because datacentre cooling typically consumes about half of the site’s power, and is consequently responsible for about half of its carbon emissions.

I suspect there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in that realm, and that it’s probably easier to make an impact on a datacentre’s power consumption by cleverly designing cooling systems than by looking at the servers.

Some people may have thought that the first part of this article was overly critical of companies taking actions to cut their emissions and impact in the first part of this series.

I think any action taken by companies to cut their emissions is a positive step and shouldn’t be discounted.

Mr Stasse tended to agree in his comments, but pointed out that there’s a lot more that ISPs could be doing and believed it was simply a band-aid solution.

Internode and Exetel have both taken positive steps and should be encouraged to continue doing so.

Special thanks to sustainable settlements designer Mike Stasse for his input, and also to Mark Newton from Internode for taking time from his busy schedule to answer my questions.

What do you think of the steps Internode is taking, and of Mark’s comments about cooling systems?