Green Tech

Google reached its goal of becoming carbon neutral for 2007 and is almost entirely neutral for 2008, Google's Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl announced on the official Google blog Wednesday evening.

In June 2007, Google had announced it was going to try to become carbon neutral by the end of that year by working to maximize its efficiency, investing in renewable energy resources, and as a last resort and interim solution buying carbon offsets.

In Wednesday evening's post announcing the company had finally achieved that goal, Weihl reiterated the company's 2007 promise of using carbon offsets was only a temporary fix and announced more initiatives towards long-term sustainability goals.

"While offsets with strong additionality can achieve real emissions reductions in unregulated sectors at a relatively low cost, we view them as a short-term solution for Google, not as a substitute for other action," said Weihl.

"In addition, we've set ourselves the ambitious goal of creating 50 megawatts of new renewable generation capacity--enough to power 50,000 typical U.S. homes--by 2012," he said.

Earlier this month, the company shared one of its quirkier Green alternative solutions: using goats to cuts the Mountain View, Calif., campus lawn.

As there is yet no legal standard on how a company must calculate its carbon footprint or an official U.S. carbon certifying agency, Google said in its June announcement that it would be hiring the Environmental Resources Trust to verify its yearly assessment . Google also stated that its global carbon footprint includes employee commuting and business travel, as well as Google company construction, server manufacturing, and electricity use.

So, how does this compare to others? Matching how Google stacks up against other big names in tech is difficult since everyone calculates things uniquely, as they do with recycling. Here's the available info on the carbon neutrality status of several big names in tech.

This past March, Microsoft announced on its sustainability blog that the company plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 30 percent compared with its 2007 levels, by 2012.

In August 2008, Dell announced that it was carbon neutral in terms of its global electricity use and in April 2008 announced that its U.S. headquarters, consisting of 2.1 million square feet and 10,000 employees, was powered by 100 percent green energy. It's striving to achieve carbon neutrality through a combination of efficiency practices and buying carbon offsets.

Hewlett-Packard has announced a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 16 percent from its 2005 levels before the end of 2010. About 99 percent of HP's greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity use, with only 1 percent coming from manufacturing and refrigeration equipment, according to HP. HP detailed that its official carbon footprint will include HP's owned and leased facilities' electricity use, natural gas use, manufacturing emissions, and refrigerant emissions. HP will not be including employee commuting, transport of its products, or the manufacturing of its suppliers in its carbon footprint, according to HP's "Global Citizenship Report 2008."

In May 2007, IBM held a press conference to announce that to help other companies become carbon neutral. Part of its promise is that it can help the average 25,000-square-foot data center cut its energy bills by 42 percent. Between 1990 and 2007, IBM reduced about 45 percent of the company's 1990 global CO2 emissions. It plans to reduce its energy use by 12 percent from its 2005 levels by 2012 through conservation, increased use of renewable energy, and buying Renewable Energy Certificates, according to the company materials on its environmental stance. It plans to reduce its total global GHG emissions by 7 percent from 2005 to 2012, according to a listing with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Comparing footprint size
You could keep sifting through all the corporate sustainability reports and get varying systems of carbon footprint measurements and statistics like those above for almost every tech company. There are some organizations that have tried to come up with a way to make it easier to compare.

The EPA lists companies that have joined its Climate Leaders initiative and their stated goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, but many companies simply have "greenhouse gas reduction goal is under development" next to their listing. The list also fails to specify what each company includes in its carbon footprint.

But according to that EPA list, Intel will reduce its global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30 percent per from 2004 to 2010; Cisco will reduce by 25 percent from 2007 to 2012; and Oracle plans to reduce "by 6 percent per square foot from 2003 to 2010 for all non-data center space and to purchase 5 percent green power for data centers." Sun Microsystems reduced U.S. GHG emissions by 23 percent from 2002 to 2007 and pledged to the EPA that it would reduced its global GHG emissions by 20 percent from 2007 to 2015.

In May 2008, Climate Counts, a nonprofit watch group funded by yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm that keeps scorecards on companies environmental records, released a list on tech and software companies' green achievements. Companies were rated by a points system and also placed into one of three (green, yellow or red) categories. IBM, Canon, Toshiba, Sony, HP, Motorola, Hitachi, Samsung, Siemens, and Google were put in the green category signaling companies with a good environmental record.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, and Nokia were put in the yellow category signaling that they had made a start, but still had work to do in certain areas.

Amazon.com, Apple, and eBay were placed in the red category which, according to Climate Counts' chart, stands for "This company is not yet taking meaningful action on climate change."

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Dell has declared itself carbon-neutral, but good luck defining and auditing what that means exactly.

Assembling PCs at Dell's Hortolandia, Brazil, facility.

(Credit: Dell)

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story on Dell and its carbon-neutral efforts. In a nutshell:

• There is no standard definition of carbon neutral;
• Purchasing carbon credits is vital;
• But the markets for carbon credits isn't regulated and is also in flux;
• And finally there's debate over whether a vendor should count emissions from suppliers in its footprint.

Those points are notable for companies well beyond Dell. While Dell is certainly early with its carbon-neutral claim, other companies will soon follow. For now, green tech looks recession-proof. Get ready for the carbon neutral audits.

A few key excerpts from the Journal story:

The amount of emissions Dell has committed to neutralize is known in the environmental industry as the company's "carbon footprint." But there is no universally accepted standard for what a footprint should include, and so every company calculates its differently. Dell counts the emissions produced by its boilers and company-owned cars, its buildings' electricity use, and its employees' business air travel.

In fact, that's only a small fraction of all the emissions associated with Dell. The footprint doesn't include the oil used by Dell's suppliers to make its computer parts, the diesel and jet fuel used to ship those computers around the world, or the coal-fired electricity used to run them.

And.

Dell's drive offers an early road map of the thorny questions companies will face as they attempt the massive emission reductions scientists say are needed to curb global warming. In a global economy with so many interconnected players, figuring out who should be responsible for cutting which emissions -- and how to ensure those cuts happen -- is dizzyingly complicated.

Toss in nascent markets for buying carbon credits and you see a lot of confusion ahead. To make matters worse, companies don't have to file carbon neutrality reports that are under generally accepted principles. In other words, you won't find the details of carbon neutrality in an annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In reality, none of this is surprising. Companies like Dell are ahead of the curve and in many respects make this carbon neutrality stuff up as they go along. As more companies start issuing carbon neutrality press releases, however, there will be a need to seriously vet these claims.

Dell has claimed it is now officially a carbon-neutral company--five months ahead of its own projected schedule.

Dell released this ultra-small green consumer desktop PC, called the Studio Hybrid, in July.

(Credit: Dell)

The target was apparently met through improved energy efficiency at Dell's own facilities, combined with "green" electricity purchases and investments in wind power in the U.S., China, and India, totaling 645 million kilowatt-hours and creating savings of 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Dell has invested $3 billion annually in green energy, and its consumption of green energy has increased almost tenfold to 116 million kWh in four years.

Dane Parker, Dell's global environment, health, and safety director, said the achievement reflects a long-established policy at Dell of saving energy, recycling, and other green practices.

Parker hailed the meeting of the target as an achievement that is "a major step forward in our commitment to become the greenest technology company on the planet and establishes our leadership position for others in the industry and all other industries across the globe."

He added: "The way energy costs are, they are just not sustainable, so, for business to be competitive in the future, we need constant supplies of green energy, and so we are trying to enable that everywhere we can globally."

But Dell's fanfare announcement was met with skepticism in some quarters. Clive Longbottom, of business and IT analyst firm Quocirca said: "It really worries me when companies claim they have achieved carbon neutrality, when it's really not possible."

"You have to question whether they have taken all their workers' commuting into consideration, and the materials (involved) in making a computer, going all the way back to zinc mining."

Longbottom continued: "Carbon neutrality is a large amount of greenwash. Computer companies should be focusing on the developments made in recent years in the reduction of harmful material inside the computers, and reduction in the power that computers use. With these high claims, companies are setting themselves up to be knocked back down again."

In addition, Dell also unveiled its partnership with Conservation International to preserve 591,000 acres of rain forest in Madagascar. It is hoped the project will prevent 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere over the next five years.

The project will also protect the habitat of two of the world's rarest primates, found only in Madagascar.

Toby Jansen Smith of Conservation International welcomed the partnership with Dell and highlighted the importance of the project in combating climate change.

He said: "Tropical deforestation accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse emissions--much more than cars, trucks, and planes combined."

Neil Vowles of Silicon.com reported from London.

Dell on Wednesday said its server power supplies have met an industry target of 92 percent efficiency.

Its servers comply with the 80 Plus benchmark of making power supplies 92 percent efficient when a server is at 50 percent load, explained Albert Esser, Dell's vice president of power and infrastructure solutions.

Esser said the server power supply Dell has developed is the first to comply with the 80 Plus Gold certification, making it 14 percent more efficient than existing equipment.

That standard also meets the 2009 target set by IT industry consortium Climate Savers.

What's perhaps most notable from Dell's announcement--part of a marketing barrage from IT vendors touting energy efficiency--is that it underscores the growing importance of industry standards.

Industry experts have called for the equivalent of a miles-per-gallon rating for servers and other IT equipment so that buyers can compare products on efficiency.

Esser said Dell is participating in 80 Plus and Climate Savers programs, and will be following the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star 5.0 standard, which is still being developed.

Dell plans to use the power supply in some server models later this year, according to a company representative.

Update at 8:55 a.m. PT with when Dell plans to use the power supplies.

Bragging rights in the PC industry have shifted from being cheap on price to efficient with energy.

Dell on Wednesday announced energy efficiency targets for its laptops and desktop PCs: a 25 percent reduction by 2010 based on the efficiency rating of today's models.

In about a month, it will set out an efficiency target for its server line as well, according to Albert Esser, vice president of power and infrastructure solutions at Dell.

Dell showed off an ultrasmall energy-efficient PC last month, which will be aimed at consumers.

(Credit: Dell)

For a sign of what more energy-efficient PCs from Dell may look like, Esser pointed to the ultrasmall PC which CEO Michael Dell showed off in April at the "Fortune Brainstorm: Green" conference in Los Angeles. That machine takes up 80 percent less space and consumes 70 percent less than one of Dell's minitower PCs.

With high energy costs and more concerns over the environmental impact of computing, many computer vendors are pushing energy efficiency in their product development and marketing.

Esser said Dell's efficiency program is driven by customer demand for less expensive equipment and Dell's own environmental stewardship program. Dell intends to be carbon-neutral from its operations by the end of this year.

To reach its 25 percent reduction goal, Dell will continue to improve on existing development in hardware and firmware, including power management, efficient fans, and better power supplies.

WASHINGTON--Dell chief Michael Dell and other high-profile technology company CEOs descended on the nation's capital Wednesday with a message for policymakers: do more to encourage energy-efficient practices, but don't spell out specific standards for the products that companies like theirs build.

On behalf of a lobby group known as the Technology CEO Council, Dell, EMC chief Joe Tucci, and Applied Materials head Mike Splinter suggested the government should do more to "lead by example." They said it can do that by reevaluating its own power consumption, setting "high goals" for energy efficiency, awarding presidential medals to companies that excel in using information technology to boost their energy efficiency, and minimizing trade and tariff barriers and maximizing tax incentives for companies with a track record of efficient energy use.

"The industry is moving, the market is moving, but it could and should be moving faster," Bruce Mehlman, the Technology CEO Council's executive director, told reporters during a morning briefing. "This is a good place to help get that message out."

Often, when business leaders ramp up Capitol Hill lobbying, they're attempting to stave off burdensome new regulations, but Mehlman and the executives said there's no particular proposal floating around that troubles them at the moment.

Still, Dell, whose remarks began with a boast about his company's "commitment to being the greenest technology company on the planet," pointed out that there are some things government shouldn't do, such as attempting to establish a "one-size-fits-all mandate for development and design of IT products."

The executives also touted two new studies that convey what some may consider to be a paradox: by their estimation, the rise of technology use has actually helped improve energy efficiency.

One of those reports, commissioned by the Technology CEO Council and produced by economists at the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), argues that for every kilowatt hour of electricity consumed by computers, servers, telecommunications technology, and all manner of gadgets, the U.S. economy increased its overall energy savings by a factor of about 10.

Although that conclusion may seem counterintuitive, it's based on the idea that those gadgets are displacing the need for other energy-consuming activities, resulting in energy savings, said study co-author John Laitner, an economist and former Environmental Protection Agency official. He described an example from his own life: rather than flying to Sweden for a meeting, he recently partook in it from a local office via videoconference. (Laitner also nevertheless acknowledges in the report a "lack of precise data" to back the findings.)

The second report, produced by the Technology CEO Council, lists dozens of examples of products made by its member companies and others that have managed to improve power consumption over the years.

According to the ACEEE report, the information and communications technology sector currently accounts for about 6 percent of the nation's power consumption, up from about 2 percent to 3 percent in 2000. But CEOs like Dell and EMC's Tucci said they're confident that improvements in technology will keep that percentage from growing exponentially in the years to come.

The suggestions, for the record, aren't exactly new. In a report to Congress last August, the EPA suggested the nation could save up to $4 billion in energy costs if it made its data centers more energy-efficient. The agency also predicted that the amount of power used by U.S. data centers, which consumed 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2006, would more than double over the next five years, at a cost of $7.4 billion each year.