Slashdot Mirror
Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits
BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"
Actually it does according to market theory.
Currently the market does not integrate the cost of emitting carbon in the atmosphere. As a result the carbon emitting technologies seem to be less expensive for the same result and the market logically develops these. Introducing a feedback in the market that the carbon emissions actually has a cost sends a message saying that carbon emitting tech is not the most efficient choice. The market will find an alternative solution instead of a solution being forced on it which might not be the most efficient in the end.
You mention that you want to eliminate the problem in the first place then you mention solar power, but how do you know that solar power is the best, or that nuclear power is? Maybe it's wind based, or ethanol based, or hydrogen based power or even cattle based power that's the most efficient. Or maybe a company will start doing research because there is a market for it and someone will come up with a transimentional p0rn energy extractor or even an Anonymous Coward based power source, who knows ?
The thing is the market will integrate the feedback signal and propagate it. This avoids forcing decisions on the market about the solution, the certificates are only reminding it of the problem. Going for carbon-netural server-farm is simply passing along the signal back to energy producers.
It looks like it's working for other problems.IIRC sulfur dioxid emission certificates led companies who claimed that installing an emission cleaner for it cost too muuch to actually install them even though buying the certificates seemed to cost less. the real price (vs company reported) of installing the cleaner was less than trading certificates in the long term thus they ended up investing.
Let's hope it will work for carbon too.
Hmmm... Let's list the first nation with an emission test for vehicles. (California 1966, USA 1968)
How about the first legislation on auto manufacturers for fuel efficiency (USA 1975)
Now, just to be sure, let's list the top five carbon emitting nations - per capita.
Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Luxembourg, Trinidad and Tobago (weird)
I hope this helps to change your perception. Granted, some of our policies are misguided, or downright stupid, but that's a lot different than intentionally negligent.
Actually, lets list them all
And lets observe that the top 9 have a population of about 12million, and are all island, desert or city states.
Let us also observe that the major European states (UK, Germany, France, Spain) all have half the per-capita figures of the USA.
The reason the US eneacted those laws before Europe is because Europe was going for small and efficient anyway (E.g. by producing the Mini and VW beetle, and there was already pressures on fuel efficiency via fuel taxes and fuel rationing (during the war).
This attempt at spinning the figures, plus trying to shift the focus away from yourselves and small countries, most of whom are producing oil for the industrialised nations anyway, will only reinforce many perceptions about Americans.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
People had their own little sandbox in the old days too. If you were paying large sums for an account on a timesharing system, you'd want to be sure that some idiot wasn't chewing all your CPU time or memory. And you certainly wouldn't want other people having access to your files. Hence the elaborate systems to virtualize and isolate each instance, and quota out system resources fairly.
Please remember that in computing, nothing new has been invented since 1970.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com