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Roughly speaking your typical geeks colo box uses roughly about 1Amp at 230volts – (1 cpu 1 disk 2Gb ram and a PSU thats a few years old) Thats about 2 tons of gold standard carbon offsetting you need to do to earn your self some Green Karma.

Geeks all have “their box” hosted at a colo at “mates rates” or a dedicated server hosted in a re-developed mall in central USA where power is dirt cheap. or hidden at the bottom of a rack in a building who’s name starts tele-something. They relentlessly use power and cooling 24×7x365.25 and have a pretty substantial impact on the environment as a result.

Mine is in Amsterdam, it’s a nice place to visit for a fun weekend

Generally it does enough work so justify its existence, however I feel the same about it being there as I did when it was at home in the loft. It’s sucking power and a bit of a geek luxury. So I figure I need some karma points and did some research into offsetting the CO₂ generated powering the thing. I don’t link M$ very often but this blog article explains PUE very well nice idea for a corporate blog too.

carbonfootprint.com say you generate 430g (grams) of CO₂ per KWh (Kilo Watt hour)

Traditional Power Station Emissions
Oil 740g/Kwh : Coal 32g/Kwh : Gas 385g/Kwh

430g/Kwh will do for me.

Your server has a reasonably lousy PSU if it’s over a year old, a hot CPU a few fans a squeaky disk or two spinning like mad and some RAM and a chipset – they draw about 1 amp, In the UK a 300W PSU = 1.3A and if your running at 100% load it won’t have lasted more than a couple of months so lets do the sums assuming your running at a single Amp.

1Amp = 230W
230Watts*24hours*365days (you hope) = 2014.8Kwh/year
2014.8Kwh * 430g/kwh = 866020g of CO₂ = 0.86602 Tonnes of CO₂

Thats only half the story…. you’ve got to cool the thing too if you’re in a colo.

Energy efficiency calculations are fought with pitfalls so here is an easy way to do it , it’s called PUE.
PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness ratio) = Total Power used by building / Power used by racked kit
(I told you it was simple)

Do you know the PUE for your data center? Nope? nor do I, however thanks to this UPS case study I’m stealing this factoid… “According to the Uptime Institute, the average ratio is 2.5”

We’re going to assume a PUE of 2.5, So 1 Watt used by the server is actually 2.5 watts of energy consumed by your colo’d box overall.

A 1 Amp server is responsible for 0.86602 Tonnes

Timesd by a PUE of 2.5 = 2.16505 tonnes of CO₂ Per year.

Wow

So don’t go out and plant a bunch of trees in your back garden yet because there is a better (for the planet) way to offset CO₂. Think about the Carbon cycle for a second… By investing in a project that saves energy in a place where they use only fossil fuels to generate power your offsetting monies have the greatest impact on the environment. It works like this. Your 1 amp little server uses the same power as about 10 60W incandescent bulbs. CF bulbs are 80% more efficient than incandescent bulbs so you need to replace 12. Replacing incandescent bulbs in areas that use oil is maximizing your offset investment for the planet to the tune of 740g per Kilowatt Hour for oil fired power stations.

If you’d rather offset locally than thats still a good thing to do

So round it up to 3 Tonnes if you need the Karma to offset the extra 5” of Flatscreen space you don’t use because your hacking in a 80×25 ssh terminal all the time

co2balance.uk.com have an interesting set of projects with good descriptions too.

Justin posted about some worthy offset projects too.

Please make sure that your offsetting is done via a non-profit organisation and that they meet with both the Gold Standard and Voluntary Carbon Standard to maximise your good deed.

Let me know if you did below!