Jun 26, 2009 10:51 AM,

Green carbon trade market could mean billions for telecom, IT

By Ed Gubbins

Cap-and-trade carbon offset legislation could let polluters pay for data centers, networks

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Telecom and IT companies are well-positioned to tap the potentially $700-billion market for lowering carbon dioxide emissions, according to Bill St. Arnaud, chief research officer at CANARIE, the Canadian research house.

The US House of Representatives may vote as early as today on the Waxman-Markey environmental bill that would create a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions, forcing companies who put out too much CO2 to pay for green initiatives that offset their pollution.

Today much of those offsetting initiatives are focused on planting trees and reducing methane in garbage dumps. But those offset dollars could go to telecom and IT, Arnaud said in an interview you can listen to in its entirety here.

“We have several studies, like the Smart 2020 report and others, showing that using [information communication technologies (ICT)] – networks and computers, we can reduce the carbon footprint of a business or consumer by at least 20%,” Arnaud said. “So [ICT] can have a bigger impact on reducing the carbon footprint than planting trees.”

For its part, CANARIE is hoping to spur green ICT technologies this year by awarding $3 million to companies that can help it build a zero-carbon-emitting data center network. Earlier this month, CANARIE announced a call for proposals whose initial responses are due on June 29 (Monday), with full applications due in September and awards given in October.

Google has used hydro power to achieve zero-carbon-emission (or near-zero) data centers. Others have used solar and wind power.

“We’re trying to go to the next phase of this,” Arnaud said, using cloud computing to distribute data centers so that, when the wind is blowing in Wyoming, computing tasks are shifted to the data center there, and when the wind stops blowing, computing shifts back elsewhere – to where the sun is shining, for example. The same could be done for network routers using standard routing protocols, Arnaud said.

“The carbon offsets alone can pay for all this exciting new technology, whether it’s computers, data centers, networks and so forth,” Arnaud said.