Energy Pulse Blog

Well, here we go. The first blog and what better topic to start with than the issue of carbon offsets. When we first decided to set up Energy Today, we looked into how we could become “carbon neutral”, but what a can of worms it has become. Even if we could work out how much energy our website was going to use - and that still remains just an educated guess - there is a lot of controversy over the whole idea of offsets. The Australia Institute has recently published a paper “Carbon Offsets: Saviour or Cop-out?” in which they say:

“In short, while some types of offsets can act as an effective means to address greenhouse gas emissions, they should not be seen as a license to pollute or as a means to continue unsustainable practices. Too often, offsets are being used by governments and business as a smokescreen to distract people from the need to cut emissions. By diverting people’s funds and attention to projects that are unlikely to reduce emissions significantly, some offset schemes could ultimately do more harm than good.”

-ouch!

Interestingly, they rank forestry projects last in terms of their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Anyway, until website hosting organisations start using renewable energy to power their data centres there’s not much else we can do. There are quite a few data centres in the USA and Europe that claim to be powered by renewable energy, but I couldn’t find any in Australia. And it shouldn’t be just about signing up to Greenpower for the server power bill. There’s the data centre lighting, air-conditioning, backup systems, printers, coffee machines etc. No sense in using Greenpower and then driving to the office in your 4WD…

I guess if we really wanted to reduce our emissions we would host our website with a data centre in Tasmania. After all their emission intensity is only 0.06 kg CO2/kWh - about 5% of NSW. At least we’re not based in Victoria.