Estimating a Data Center's Electrical Carbon Footprint
Data center carbon emissions are a growing global concern. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cites data centers as a major source of energy consumption in the United States. The EPA has set an efficiency target for government data centers: a 20% reduction in carbon footprint by 2011. European Union (EU) members have agreed to cut their combined emissions of greenhouse gases to 8% below the 1990 level by 2012. Data center owners will be increasingly challenged to report their carbon emissions. This paper introduces a simple approach, supported by free web-based tools, for estimating the carbon footprint of a data center anywhere in the world.