A first application of the Carbon Accounting and Certification Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Operating System for Climate Action of the Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group is a calculator for the carbon emissions of a data center. It would calculate and then allocate the carbon emissions of the data center's assets, so that the users of the data center could see the emissions from their hosted resourcesWG is an application to allow data centers to credibly prove that they're carbon neutral with trusted data and Renewable Energy Certificates (REC's) and carbon offsets.
We chose data centers as our first application because:
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The application would use several permissioned Hyperledger channels, as described in the the Carbon Accounting and Certification Minimum Viable Product (MVP)Operating System for Climate Action, on these inputs:
- Data center meta-data, such as its name and location.
- Data center activity metrics, such as the number of U-racks of servers or the amount of CPU compute units, storage, and bandwidth provided during a time period.
- Utility bills for the data center.
- CO2 emissions of the utilities, obtained from the Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) of the EPA.
- Renewable Energy Certificates (REC's) purchased and retired by the data center.
- Carbon offsets purchased by the data center.
The permissioned ledgers would include:
- Energy use data, which could come from any combination of
- Utility channel – This would be a ledger for the utility bills, set up by utility or its service provider, for its customers. It would issue tokens for each customer based on the carbon footprint of their energy purchased, which would be calculated based on the utility bill for the customers and the utility's overall emissions.
- RECs channel – This would be a ledger set up by one or more sellers of REC's. The seller would issue tokens for buyers based on quantity purchased.
- UPS log data – Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) for the servers which could provide a log of power use by the servers. This could then be used to estimate the HVAC costs for the servers based on models of cooling requirements for the server's space. This method could be used when the data center does not have its own meter or utility bill and is instead aggregated with other building or campus utility bills.
- Server utilization data – This could come directly from the servers themselves, which could report their up time and load levels. This data could then be combined with models of energy use for the servers and their required HVAC to come up with energy usage. This would be useful for determining the effects of software running on the servers.
- RECs and carbon offsets from the Emissions Tokens NetworkCarbon offsets channel - This would be a ledger set up by one or more sellers of carbon offsets, also issuing tokens for buyers based on quantity purchased.
The data center would subscribe to all of the above channels and use the tokens to calculate its energy use with a smart contract which:
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Note that such a calculator is only calculating the carbon footprint of the existing equipment in a data center. It could be expanded eventually to cover the full Greenhouse Gas Protocol for data center, so that it could be used to certify a "carbon neutral" data center. That would require accounting for all the Scope 3 emissions, including the carbon footprint of new capital assets (servers), employee commuting and business travel, and other purchased supplies and equipment.
We will could implement this MVP application using the True TCO Calculator for Data Centers, as described in this Uptime Institute white paper.
References
- Why green cloud optimization is profitable for you and the planet (ThoughtWorks)
- Building Data Center of the Future (Data Center Frontier)
- Data centers are more energy efficient than ever (Google)