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Green Government, Local Government, Policy

Free green power for Canadian government IT

By Alice Kok | 27 August 2008

Provincial governments in Canada are ‘greening’ their ICT processes—their data centres are set to be powered by renewable hydro-electricity. Gordon Brown British Columbia Premier has promised carbon-neutral and green-certified facilities for the upcoming 2010 Olympics set to be held in Vancouver.

This has the province introducing a consumer-based tax—a first in North America—and comes with a mandate for the public sector to be carbon-neutral by 2010.

Government agencies, healthcare and educational institutions must address this issue in two years or face taxes—coming from their budgets—for every activity that generates carbon.

The key to reduce consumption for the public sector lies in using zero-carbon data centres. This means that organisations will not be competing with other sectors for power as the data centre would essentially have free power.

Hydro-electric sites that are too remote and uneconomical for development can be used as dedicated power sources for data centres. And while smelters and car plants cannot be moved easily to remote sites with renewable energy sources, data centres can if fibre-optic telecom lines for transmitting data to urban centres are present.

British Columbia is a natural candidate for developing these data centres because of its untapped falls in coastal areas, abandoned dams, geographic stability and proximity to power-hungry California.

However, it is not the only region with abandoned dams. Many such other sites exist throughout North America. Ontario, Manitoba and New Brunswick too have potential sites and have their eyes on such zero-carbon data centre development—as is the federal government.

Such mandates allow provinces to show their green colours without imposing hardship on voters.

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