August 2009 Archives

Monday News Roundup:

• Active Power, a manufacturer of green critical power solutions and uninterruptible power systems, has earned more than $5 million in new orders for its PowerHouse system.

• Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has opened a green data center in Yokohama, Japan.

• Kansas City-based 1102 Grand is publishing a series of white papers on how to implement green data centers in historic buildings.

• Thursday is Power IT Down Day.

• IDC Manufacturing Insights has released two new studies to assess the current market for green IT.

• Fujitsu announces it's one of the first vendors to achieve multinational EPEAT certification.

• Samsung believes that low-voltage DDR3 and enterprise SSDs can save over 10 percent in power per data center server.

• San Francisco-based BEAR Data Systems announces end-to-end data center solutions that small businesses can rely on to reduce their carbon footprint.

Earlier this week I blogged about the importance of numbers when it comes to the climate debate. The debate over the meaning of numbers is coming to a head when it comes to electric vehicles. Electric cars, it seems, may be on the verge of a renaissance of sorts after the debacle of GM's EV1 and other short-lived efforts. They're quiet, eco-friendly, and apparently pretty damn quick as well. Compared to a regular engine or even a hybrid, forthcoming electric cars promise some pretty amazing fuel mileage numbers. GM's $40,000 volt is promising 230 mpg, while Nissan's forthcoming Leaf is promising 367 mpg. Hang on just a second, though. MPG stands for Miles Per Gallon, right? If electric cars don't use any fuel, how can the term "gallon" make any sense in measuring the fuel efficiency of electric cars?

It turns out that it doesn't make much sense at all, and that the 230 and 367 mpg numbers are pretty much just marketing hogwash. Worse, although they are expressed in "mpg," the two numbers aren't even comparable to each other, so it would be false to say that the Leaf gets 137 mpg better than the Volt. They are computed using different methodologies and assumptions, and are really virtually useless.

Take the Volt, for example. Its drivetrain is driven exclusively by electricity generated from its onboard batteries. If you plug it into the grid to charge the batteries to full capacity, you should be able to get 40 miles of range before it needs to be recharged. If you don't plug it in after 40 miles, a small engine fires up and charges the battery. Therefore, if you keep all your trips to less than 40 miles and charge it using only the grid, theoretically you could own a Volt and not burn a drop of gasoline! On the other hand if you routinely drive more than 40 miles between charges, you'll use a lot more gasoline. GM used a 51 mile daily cycle to arrive at the 230 mpg figure.

The Leaf, on the other hand, has no engine at all. It's driven exclusively by electricity and boasts a 100 mile range per charge for its batteries. Its 367 mpg figure is calculated based on a "theoretical" calculation converting electricity into a petroleum equivalent.

The Volt and the Leaf are revolutionary vehicles and have the potential to transform the automotive and battery industries. The trickle-down effects to IT and green tech will be awesome to watch. The accompanying marketing hype, however, threatens to dilute the transformative power of these vehicles until the industry can figure out a more meaningful way to communicate efficiency to consumers.

Numbers are incredibly important in the IT world, measuring gigabytes and teraflops, allowing us to quantify processing speed, storage capacity, latency and bandwidth. Numbers allow us to make judgments about the relative goodness of something compared to something else. Numbers give sense to the words better and faster.

In the climate change arena, numbers are still very much a fluid game with all kinds of distractions and obfuscations to muddy the water. How much is too much, and how little is too little? Take, for instance, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report recommending that policy makers cap the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (PPM). We are currently at 390 PPM (compare this to the 800,000 years before the industrial revolution, when nature kept carbon at 180-300 ppm). So we still have some room to go to get to 450 PPM, right?

Not so fast. Many scientists have since attacked the IPCC report, with some observing that at 450 PPM, there's still a pretty good chance of catastrophic climate change. A group of respected scientists, including NASA's James Hansen, thinks that:

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.

I don't know about you, but a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed" sounds like a pretty nice planet to me. The problem is political will to get there. 450 PPM was seen as politically reachable, but 350 is another ball game completely. Organizations such as 350.org are trying to bring awareness to this new number. The movement got a huge boost a couple days ago when Rajenda Pachauri, the Chairman of the IPCC, endorsed the 350 PPM target. Whereas 450 PPM will yield a 2 degree rise by the end of the century, 350 PPM will keep the rise to 1.5 degree (Celcius).

So there you have it, PPM CO2 in a nutshell. Whether the world can achieve 350 or even 450 PPM remains very much up in the air, and the next few months will be critical in determining that path as the US considers passing ACES in the fall and the UN meets in Copenhagen in December.

The US Green Building Council administers the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Program, an independent third party certification of how "green" a particular building is. In making the determination, LEED looks at six major categories: Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, Indoor Environmental Quality, and Innovation and Design. Points are awarded in each category, which then lead to classification as Certified, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. As far as ratings systems go, LEED is well-accepted and well-respected with few competitors.

Achieving Platinum status is not easy, and it's especially difficult for data centers, notorious power hogs. The folks who bring the ACT college admissions test have proven that it's not impossible, however. ACT has received LEED Platinum certification for its data center in Iowa, which opened in 2008. This is the first LEED Platinum data center in the U.S.

One of the unique features in the ACT data center is its geothermal heating and cooling system. Heat transfer loops are buried hundreds of feet into the ground, where the temperature of the earth is stable all year round. Depending on the season, the system either draws cooling and dissipates heat into the ground, or draws heat and dissipates cooling into the ground. Other green features include high-efficiency HVAC systems, recycled content in more than 30 percent of the building materials, 90% native prairie landscaping and renewable materials such as cork flooring, cotton wall insulation, aspen fiber ceiling panels and agrifiber wood doors.

As impressive as this facility is, it's not the first LEED Platinum data center in the world. That distinction belongs to Citi's Data Centre in Frankfurt. This is a huge 230,000 sq ft facility (the ACT data center is 4000 sq ft). Designed by ARUP, the data center is Citi's largest outside the United States. Compared to conventional data centers, it's 72% more energy efficient and 30% more water efficient. A green wall on one side of the building serves to insulate the interior, while a fenestrated wall offers daylight and natural ventilation. The building has a green roof that absorbs rainwater and keeps the facility cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. The use of reverse osmosis for water cooling will save over 50 million liters of water per year. Check out the pics in the link, it's one impressive facility.

Monday News Roundup

• Carfax and Michigan International Speedway will plant more than 4000 trees to neutralize carbon from auto and energy use during the "Show Me the CARFAX Race Weekend."

• GreenChoice Bank, a green community bank in the Midwest, has selected Fiserv, a provider of financial services technology solutions, to provide an enterprise-wide technology solution.

• Electronic Environments Corporation and AdaptivCool have formed an alliance to reduce data center energy consumption.

• The Denver Regional Transportation District, with 1040 buses and 120 light rail vehicles, has selected Wyse Technology to manage every aspect of its fleet using thin clients and virtualization.

• Santa Fe-based Upsite Technologies recently played host to four South Korean university students, sponsored by LG, to examine the best way to construct green data centers.

• WhipTail Technologies has licensed EasyCo LLC's Managed Flash Technlogy (MFT) to improve performance of SSDs in WhipTail's storage devices while reducing energy use by up to 90 percent and carbon footprint by up to 60 percent.

While the United States continues to debate carbon cap and trade as a policy matter, the folks over in the E.U. have been living with a carbon trading program since 2005, the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System (EU ETS). The first phase of the program, which included the "big polluters" such as energy, paper, minerals and steel production, lasted until about 2007 and was widely seen as ineffective in reducing carbon emissions due to overly generous caps. Nonetheless, the legal framework is in place within the member countries of the EU to place a carbon cap and force companies to either reduce carbon or purchase credits or allowances in order to exceed caps.

None of this has mattered much to American companies unless they had European subsidiaries that had to comply. This is about to change for one certain American industry: airlines. In 2008, as part of Phase II of the EU ETS, the aviation sector was targeted for inclusion by 2012. 85% of the emission permits will be given away, while the remaining 15% will be for sale by auction, with money raised to go towards mitigating climate change. The carbon cap calls for a 3% reduction in 2012, and annual 5% reductions starting in 2013.

Although the aviation sector only accounts for 3% of the total CO2 emissions within the EU, the significant part of this story is that it's the first time the EU ETS will apply to non-EU countries. In legal terms, this is called extraterritorial application of law, and it's hugely controversial. The European Parliamant spokesman himself called it a "revolution" in the ETS to begin covering non-European entities.

In anticipation of the 2012 deadline, the EU law calls for airlines to submit plans on how to measure their carbon emissions by August 2009 (that's now), with monitoring and reporting to the EU to begin in January 2010. This reporting period in 2010 and 2011 will determine how the free credits will be allocated starting in 2012. And last week, the EU released the list of covered entities, which is over 4,000 airlines, jet operators, and even foreign air forces, such as the US Navy, all with operations in the E.U. The list covers several major U.S. airlines that fly to the E.U. Already, the U.S. airline industry is promising a legal challenge to what they see as a dangerous unilateral approach by the EU to impose extraterritorial laws on non-EU entities. The fear here is that other countries might do the same, leading to a patchwork of carbon trading laws airlines have to comply with, especially if the US ACES bill passes.

I think the concern is warranted. A comprehensive, international approach to carbon cap and trade is a much better idea, and it may come out of the Copenhagen UN conference in December. In the meantime, brace yourself if your company does any business in the EU, because as the ETS expands in scope, it wouldn't be surprising if the covered entities expands beyond airlines to cover other sectors, including tech.

In the bad-boy club of polluters, Australia and the United States stood out as particularly troublesome at the turn of the century, both refusing to endorse the Kyoto Protocols on capping greenhouse gas emissions due to concerns about the economic impact. The United States is the largest absolute polluter of GHG, while Australia remains the largest per-capita polluter of greenhouse gas, as well as the world's largest exporter of coal. But that was then, with conservative governments in power in both countries. Now, with more moderate governments under President Obama and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, both nations are re-examining their contributions and solutions to climate change. Both will be heavily scrutinized at the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen in December, where the rest of the world, including the developing BRIC countries, will pay close attention to whether these two have reformed their ways.

The touchstone to any reform is a cap on greenhouse gasses. The U.S. will try to do it with carbon cap and trade, pending in the Senate and due to be taken up next month. Down under, meanwhile, legislators this week failed to pass a carbon cap and trade bill. In a compromise, both the coalition and opposition parties did pass a renewables bill instead, which would require 20% of the country's energy to come from renewable energy by 2020 (currently only 8% comes from renewable energy). According to the Australian Clean Energy Council, the bill could spur $28 billion in new generation capacity and create 28,000 clean tech jobs.

Not everyone is happy with the measure. Some environmentalists are unhappy that the bill classifies coal seam methane gas as a renewable energy, although the gas won't count towards the 20% goal. The Wall Street Journal calls the bill "loony environmentalism 101, Canberra edition." Environmentalists aren't happy either, with several from the Green party joining conservatives to vote down the climate change bill because it wasn't aggressive enough. Meanwhile, Rudd promises to re-introduce the carbon cap portion of the bill before December.

Last week I blogged about the Obama administration's pledge to spend millions of dollars on electric battery technology, and how that technology may help out the I.T. sector with battery breakthroughs, which have been scarce in recent years. This week, Ford Motor Company announced its plans to use some of that federal stimulus money to study how the energy grid can best be utilized when charging electric vehicles.

What Ford plans to do is to work with 10 utility companies and the Department of Energy to permit the vehicle being plugged in to "communicate" with smart energy grids. The grids will tell the vehicle what loads are on the grid, and provide the vehicle with several options and recommendations for charging. Those options may include how long to charge the vehicle, when to charge the vehicle, and how much the charge will cost. The idea is to minimize the impact of electric vehicles on the grid, while maximizing cost savings by taking advantage of off-peak energy prices.

So how much of this is realistic? Well, as of today it's all theoretical of course. Most of the nation's energy grid is still "dumb" and the technologies to permit smart metering are still being worked out. There aren't any actual mass-produced electric vehicles for sale yet, but the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are on their way, and Ford's own Transit and Focus electric and plug-in hybrids are on their way a bit later too. GM isn't being left behind either, with plans to use OnStar to communicate with utility companies. So I actually think that one day in the not-too-distant future, consumers (at least those in major metro cities) will be able to plug in a Ford electric vehicle, which then communicates with the power grid, and then be able to choose from several charging options and prices.

The exciting part of this research is that what works for cars will work for computers and servers too. An industry standard protocol will need to be worked out, but once it is, the ability of major appliances (including data centers) to communicate with smart energy grids will mean better utilization and greater efficiency overall.

Monday News Roundup

• Research firm IDC plans to release an index that scores a country’s ability to reduce greenhouse emissions using information and communications technology. The company plans to release the index prior to the Copenhagen climate change conference in December.

• Mexican export development bank Bancomext has selected IBM to deliver an integrated green IT solution to its current infrastructure.

• As part of Power IT Down Day on August 27, Citrix, Microsoft, Intel, and HP will donate $20,000 to the Wounded Warrior Project as a reminder of the money that could be saved by powering down IT equipment.

• According to Green500.org, 18 of the Top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are made by IBM.

• VirtenSys, a provider of PCI Express-based I/O Virtualization switches for data centers, announced $16 million in new funding.

• iXsystems has introduced a new line of environmentally friendly servers.

• Wyse Technology announces implementation of its green blade server and thin client technology at Kool Smiles, a dental care provider.

• Verdiem announces that its SURVEYOR PC power management software has been deployed on over one million desktop clients.

• Adtran announces that Technology Marketing Corporation has awarded one of its POE switches a Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award.

Ahh, late summer, Congress is on summer recess, and the natives are restless over health care. With all the shouting and drum-beating going on about how to fix the country's health care problems, the debate over the climate change bill has largely fallen off the radar screen. Work on the bill, which passed the House but is pending in the Senate, continues however. One of the interesting developments this week is media reports that the Senate version would ban Wall Street banks such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs from participating in the carbon markets. Senators are worried that speculators, which led the price of oil to run up to nearly $200 a barrel last summer, might wreak similar havoc on carbon permits.

As it's currently envisioned, the law would initially create an absolute limit on carbon emissions, which gradually comes down with time. Under the cap, various industries would at first be given certain allowances, or permits, to emit carbon. For many key industries the permits would be free to start with (85% of the permits would be free at first under current drafts), but then the government would put a price on the permits as time goes on. In addition, if a particular company needed additional permits, it could go out on some exchange and buy additional permits, where sellers with excess permits could sell them.

That's the idea. These permits, though, aren't going to be sold like some used hard drive on Craigslist. The price of the permits, like the price of anything else, is going to be driven by supply and demand. In addition to how many sellers and how many buyers there are, the government can obviously affect the price as well, by increasing or decreasing the number of permits to be sold. Finally, there's the banks. Investment banks like to bet on whether something is going to go up or down in price. They do it with stocks, bonds, debt, oil, natural gas, orange juice, pork bellies, etc. And they'll probably do it with carbon permits as well, betting that as prices go up or down they can cash in on some profit.

The benefit of this is liquidity. With banks buying and selling futures and derivatives in carbon, there will be lots of money in the carbon market, which presumably creates a more efficient market. At least, that's the theory. Restricting banks from participating in this market might therefore lead to a less efficient market, and therefore higher prices in the long term.

For Green IT firms, the uncertainty will certainly continue and it's probably too speculative at this point to plan on whether or not a particular company's permits are going to be worth anything. The only thing near certain at this point is that counting carbons is still coming.

The main feature of the ACES bill currently pending in the Senate after narrow House approval is, of course, carbon cap and trade. If the bill faces, the U.S. government would impose an absolute limit on the amount of carbon allowed into the atmosphere, with that limit eventually falling until by 2050, it is xy % (currently 17%) below the level it was in 2005. Under that limit, industries that do emit carbon must buy and sell permits that allow them to reach their quota of carbon, first from the government and then from each other. Cleaner companies profit by selling their excess permits while dirtier companies pay more for polluting beyond their quota. The government wins because it raises money and drives down the amount of carbon and solves the problem of global warming at the same time. At least, that's the theory.

The Wall Street Journal is carrying a very interesting story this morning about the creators of carbon cap and trade. Thomas Crocker was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in 1966 when he first pitched the idea of capping emissions. At that time the idea was aimed at pollution from fertilizer plants in Florida. Economists have been struggling for decades with how to allow a free market system to capture the cost of pollution, and Crocker's idea was the first to suggest a cap and trade system. Crocker went on to become an economics professor, and is now retired and speaking out against cap-and-trade.

He sees two problems with cap-and-trade. First, he doesn't see how cap-and-trade can work in an international trading system. "There are no institutions right now" that have the power to enforce a permit system. Indeed, China and India's refusal to adopt cap and trade means that even if the U.S. joins the E.U. in adopting cap and trade, the benefits to global warming may not be realized. Second, there is a question about how to measure the benefits at all, since the economic damage caused by global warming is hard to quantify.

His solution is an outright tax on emissions instead, which would allow greater flexibility in managing emissions. The White House isn't buying it, calling his argument a "straw man." One thing remains clear -- as cap and trade debates, the arguments over its effectiveness and long-term viability will surely swirl for years to come.

The climate change conversation has typically focused on energy costs and the search for alternative renewable forms of energy, capturing and limiting greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon, and the impact on business and economic development. The military's voice has often been missing from this conversation. I suppose that's to be expected, given that the military typically doesn't get involved in policy discussions. Its role is to execute strategy as directed by the executive and funded by the legislative, not to create its own strategy.

That voice was heard recently, though. In 2008, as part of its annual budget appropriations, Congress asked the Pentagon and the State Department to specifically address global warming in its long term plans. After examining data from NASA and NOAA, the Department of Defense has concluded that climate change poses "profound strategic challenges, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics." The New York Times carried the story over the weekend.

One retired General, Anthony C. Zinni, wrote in a report: "We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives."

The report, already cited with approval by the National Resources Defense Council, indicates that Senator John Kerry is already using the national security argument to press for passage of the carbon cap and trade bill in the Senate. While national security is typically a silver bullet because lawmakers hate to be seen as the ones who voted against safety and security, in this case I doubt it'll hold the same kind of power as say, voting for a military appropriations bill to fund continuing war operations. Nonetheless, it's a powerful argument now that the Pentagon has bought into it, and another arrow to be added to the quill of arguments in favor for carbon cap legislation.

Monday News Roundup

• 3Com Incorporated reported that Miercom, a provider of independent test services, determined that two of the company’s enterprise switches lead the industry in energy efficiency, using up to 40% less energy than competitive products.

• India-based IT services company HCL Technologies Limited completed its acquisition a data center in Parsippany, New Jersey. The company spent $15 million in upgrading the date center with green technology including virtualization.

• Lockheed Martin, a member of the EPA’s Green Power Partnership, ranks 17 out of the Top 50 Green Power Purchasers in the country.

• UK-based Sparxent, a software services company, offered five tips for IT professionals to evaluate green IT technologies.

• Kovarus, a San Francisco-based firm, replaced one of its executive’s laptops with a thin client, which promptly turned into a brick without network connectivity.

• Aberdeen Group has formed a new Green IT and Sustainability Research Practice Group.

• Verdiem announced that Cox Communications reduced its power bill by 40% by adopting Verdiem’s power management software on its networked PC clients.

In the search to replace the internal combustion engine propelling millions of cars, motorycles, trucks, SUVs, and other vehicles around the world, several technologies have emerged, some more promising than others. There's the diesel-cycle engine, of course, or the rotary engine, but those technologies are variations on a theme. Last week I blogged about hydrogen fuel cells, a promising but probably futile effort to use hydrogen. Instead, the leading technology is now the hybrid drive, a small engine and a battery pack working in tandem to directly power the driveline. These hybrids have typically used nickel metal hydride batteries. With the advent of lithum ion battery packs, the plug-in hybrid appears to be around the corner, led by GM's Chevrolet Volt. Like a hybrid, plug-in hybrids have both batteries and a small engine, but unlike hybrids, the engine never drives the driveline. Instead, the engine fires up when the battery is depleted (in the Volt, after 40 miles of electric-only driving) and recharges the battery -- the battery powers the vehicle, at all times. The WSJ has an excellent chart comparing the various technologies, including gas, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric only.

Yesterday in Elkhart Indiana, President Obama delivered a surprising shot in the arm to electric vehicles. EV's have not had a good history in this country, with GM's EV1 remaining the only commercially available EV and the subject of many conspiracy theories, as chronicled in the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?". At an RV factory, the President announced the awarding of $2.4 billion to 48 programs in 20 states, including 11 in Michigan and seven in Indiana. A lot of this money will go to auto suppliers to develop battery technology for driving electric vehicles.

One of those suppliers will likely supply the lithium ion batteries for the Nissan Leaf, announced on Monday by Nissan. The Leaf appears to be a bit of a breakthrough compared to the Volt, as Nissan claims a 100 mile range (versus the Volt's 40). Unlike the Volt, the Leaf has no internal combustion engine, so if you're out of charge, you have to find an outlet to plug the vehicle in. It charges in eight hours through a regular household outlet, or in 30 minutes with an optional quick charger. Nissan promises the Leaf will be sold by the hundreds of thousands, be available at a competitive price, and will therefore be the first truly mass-market all-electric vehicle. Some of the federal stimulus money announced by President Obama will be used to develop a new plug-in infrastructure in cities such as Oregon for the Leaf and other all-EV vehicles.

So is this a pipe dream, destined to put us all in glorified golf carts? Not according to Popular Science, which drove an actual Nissan Leaf in Japan and reported that it is a real car, with cargo space, a 90 mph top speed good for freeway driving, and comfort for a family of four.

For green IT, this week's activities hold a lot of promise as well. The technological advances made in researching advanced battery technologies may very well lead to a new generation of portable device batteries that may finally extend the life of laptops and other IT equipment.

Last week Greenpeace activists sneaked past HP security guards to paint a large "Hazardous Materials" sign on the roof of the company's main building in Palo Alto, used primarily for corporate events, product launches, and press conferences. The mission took about 10 minutes, and the paint was finger-paint, which meant it didn't take long to power wash away. No arrests were made.

What's their beef? In two acronyms, PVC and BFR.

Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) plastic, according to Greenpeace's blog, is the single most environmentally damaging of all plastics. Brominated Flame Retardants (BFR) are highly resistant to bio degradation and can bio-accumulate in humans and animals. Greenpeace says both are completely unnecessary in the production of electronics.

HP had originally committed to phasing out PVC and BFR use by the end of 2009, but now says it will phase out by the end of 2011. The two-year delay has not sat well with Greenpeace. In its July edition of Greener Electronics, the organization singled out HP, Dell, and Lenovo for failing to phase out BFR and PVC by 2009. In an accompanying press release, Greenpeace pointed out that Apple has eliminated PVC and BFR in its products, and held out Apple as the company others should aspire to. A Greenpeace spokesman said that all companies should be concentrating on matching or beating Apple's lead on this issue.

As retailers such as Wal-Mart start paying closer attention to the supply chain of their suppliers and activists such as Greenpeace continue high-visibility (but fairly benign) efforts to draw attention to company commitments, it appears that corporations such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo are going to have to step up their game to avoid any more embarrassing rooftop moments.

Nearly one in eight Americans is a Californian, and if you limit that population from Americans to "I.T. workers" the ratio is likely to be much higher. Therefore, from state-mandated low-energy televisions to state-level climate caps to CARB-mandated vehicle emissions, what California does eventually affects the whole country.

When Governor Schwarzenegger signed California's carbon cap legislation a few years ago, he mandated state agencies develop a comprehensive approach towards adapting to climate change. The first result of that mandate was released yesterday by the California Natural Resources Agency in a report titled "California Climate Adaptation Strategy." The report now moves toward a 45-day public comment period before it is finalized and moves into the regulatory phase.

The report makes it clear that climate change is already affecting California. Sea levels have risen as much as seven inches in the last decade. California has also seen a rise in extreme hot temperatures, fewer cold nights, lengthened growing season, and shifts in the water cycle as rain and snow melts change. The report warns of "severe" costs if no action is taken to address these changes.

The report addresses the following sectors: Public Health, Biodiversity and Habitat, Ocean and Coastal Resources, Water Management, Agriculture, Forestry, and Transportation and Energy Infrastructure. Of these sectors, the last (Transportation and Energy Infrastructure) is probably the most interest to I.T. The report describes the problems climate change poses to the energy infrastructure, and includes several general recommendations on renewable resources and greenhouse gas limitations. There's not much in terms of specifics, and I imagine that this will flesh out during the comment period.

This climate change report didn't grab a lot of press attention, but I think it's significant because it's part of the foundation the state is building towards a regulatory regime that will eventually cause the rest of the country to react. In spite of its current budget woes, California has a lot of money, industry, and lives at stake because of climate change, and I get the feeling they're not about to abandon the effort to change course before it's too late.

Monday News Roundup

• Nasdaq-traded Sify Technologies Limited has won the “Best Telecom Data Center” award for its next-generation green data center in Airoli, Mumbai.

• Verari Systems announces that a major cloud services provider has selected its FOREST container, utilizing ultra-efficient power and cooling subsystems.

• Emerson opened its $50 million green data center in St. Louis. The data center features the largest solar array in Missouri.

• Internap Network Services Corp. announced several green initiatives undertaken as part of its expansion of the company’s Manhattan data center.

• When Embarq Corp. decided to move towards thin clients as part of its client desktop renewal program, it did so very carefully and slowly, according to this CIO Insight.