Yahoo redesigns data center, ditches carbon offsets
Yahoo thinks its plan for a new data center could eventually help the company achieve carbon-neutral status without having to resort to the purchase of carbon offsets.
Yahoo's David Dibble discusses the company's plans for a Buffalo-area data center with New York Senator Charles Schumer (right, red tie) and other state officials.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo designed its forthcoming data center to let outside air cool the servers at all times, borrowing the idea from the design of a chicken coop, according to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. The company joined New York officials such as Governor David Patterson and Senator Charles Schumer Tuesday to unveil plans for the data center, the design of which Yahoo is attempting to patent.
Data centers are vital to huge Internet businesses such as Yahoo, and companies throughout this industry have started paying more and more attention to the amount of energy consumed by facilities that can have thousands of servers running all day, every day. Google has talked up its own push for greater efficiency in its data centers, and Microsoft just announced plans for two new data centers geared around energy efficiency.
As part of the announcement of the new data center in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo, Yahoo also revealed that it will no longer purchase carbon offsets as part of its energy strategy. Carbon offsets have been controversial in some quarters, but they allow companies to claim they are "carbon neutral," in that purchasing offsets diverts money to green projects.
Yahoo plans to focus its green strategy on projects such as the Buffalo data center rather than the purchase of offsets, which means it will take them some time to return to the carbon-neutral goal set in 2007. "We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment and gives us the best opportunity to play a leadership role in addressing climate change," Filo wrote.
Corrected at 3:05 p.m.: Yahoo clarified the new data center will be in Lockport, N.Y., just outside of Buffalo.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
And by the way, read the latest data, the planet is cooling, has been for 10 years in spite of CO2 emissions. oops, the kind of inconvenient truth that Al Gore doesn't want you to know. There is plenty of science out there that refutes the warming theories.
Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. General scientific opinion is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the 20th century
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A4.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A3.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Top10.warmest.doc
gerrg, there's plenty of data on the other side. Since you provied three, here's three more for you
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html#mod=djempersonal
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
and the news this past week that the EPA squashed an internal report that said just that, that the earth was cooling. It didn't fit their "policy directions" so they told the guy who was working on it to go do something else and to stop.
Finally, EVEN IF the planet is warming, who says that the climate that we have today is "normal" or if we're on our way to or from what was normal for the past thousand years? There is significant data that temperature drives CO2, not CO2 drives temperature (i.e. which one lags and which one leads) And you want to allow Gore and his buddies to destroy Billions in the name of junkscience? no thanks, I'm not buying it.
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7430118.PN.&OS=PN/7430118&RS=PN/7430118
Sulfur is the element that creates the greenhouse effect that allows heating. Venus has this.
This's stupid for Yahoo to do. Or any company. Marxist is America are green, not red. And it's now called global whining.
But hang on a minute, why is it hotter when I get near my fire.
Anyway, serious BtmnHatesRbn, Venus is hot because it has a significant and dense atmosphere full of greenhouse gases (including sulphur you got that bit right) and is close to the sun.
Mars is cool because it is small, thus less of a gravitational field to maintain an atmosphere and have a significant greenhouse effect, and is farther away from the sun than venus.
As for your third point, global warming or not, using less electricity saves money so being efficient is a bonus for any company.
Here is a piece of advice "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt"
- by open-mind July 2, 2009 8:05 PM PDT
- Only a small fraction of global warming is from carbon dioxide, and only a small fraction of that is made from combustion, and only a small fraction of that combustion happens in the USA, and only a small fraction of that combustion can be realistically eliminated. So lets tax the crap out of carbon-dioxide to achieve an insignificant result and destroy what's left of the US economy. Meanwhile China is building coal-electric plants as fast as possible, and Al Gore is making millions on the hysteria.
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(23 Comments)Carbon credits are a crock. You're being manipulated folks. And if not, since water-vapor is a worse global warming gas than carbon dioxide, maybe we should declare water a pollutant and start taxing that too.