Christina Page, director of climate and energy strategy at Yahoo!

Greenhouse-gas reduction regulations are descending on the UK and drafts of similar laws are slowly moving through the US legislature. Still, there are indications that data center owners in the US are not making an aggressive-enough effort to determine what exactly their carbon footprints are.

Yahoo!, a Silicon Valley-based company that serves about half of one billion users says that it has been actively measuring the carbon dioxide it generates since 2006. Its data centers are responsible for the biggest chunk of its overall footprint.

DatacenterDynamics FOCUS interviewed Yahoo’s Director of Climate and Energy Strategy Christina Page about the company’s efforts to reduce the impact of its mission-critical facilities on the environment earlier this month:

DatacenterDynamics FOCUS: What are Yahoo’s CO2 reduction targets for its data centers?

Christina Page: By 2014, the goal is to reduce the carbon intensity average of our data centers by 40 percent and that’s a combination of factors. One is siting in clean locations while recognizing that we need to go where our customers are. We’re prioritizing and looking for clean locations in terms of power sources.

(Another is) getting as thermally efficient as we can – driving the PUE measure down – and then there’s virtualization and efficiency of the servers. We’re bundling all those things together. For each unit of useful compute power, we’re trying to drive down the carbon intensity.

DCDF: How does carbon footprint of Yahoo’s data centers compare to that from the rest of the company?

CP: Data centers are the biggest part of our footprint. We’ve got very efficient office buildings already. Our main office building is our campus in Sunnyvale, Calif. That’s already a super efficient campus and we’re driving those percentage reductions in energy use year over year.

We’ve got an award-winning commute program. We’re trying to encourage people to not drive a single-occupancy vehicle to work and with our air travel, we look for ways to reduce that via TelePresence.

But in terms of really moving the needle for us as a company, it’s about the electrons from our data centers.

DCDF: Tell us about Yahoo’s data center infrastructure.

CP: We don’t really talk about that as a general rule, but we’re global. We’re serving 500 million users. It’s a combination of (enterprise and colocation facilities). We have built our first data center from the ground up in December 2007 and we just announced this summer we’re building a data center over in Lockport in New York State.

DCDF: How does Yahoo! measure its data centers’ carbon footprint?

CP: We cast a really broad net. There’s scope one, scope two and scope three emissions when you look at greenhouse gas protocols. Scope one is just taking into account what you are generating. If we were to look at our generation on our campus, it would be just how much CO2 we’re emitting when we fire up a diesel generator to test it.

Scope two is all of your electricity consumption and scope three is external things like (the) supply chain or commuting or air travel or rented space. Because in theory you could say: ‘Hey, that’s (not) a facility that I physically own and operate. I’m using its services but the footprint belongs to those people over there.

We don’t do that. Big chunk of our footprint is our colos, so we include in our footprint all of our office buildings, whether they’re leased or owned – globally – and all of our data centers, whether they’re colos or owned – globally.

And I don’t see that changing with our approach to cloud. We’re always going to be involved with the operations of service (providers).

DCDF: What do you think are some of the most promising new energy-saving technologies (heat recapture, energy storage, etc.)?

CP: I think (heat recapture) is a great idea if you have a local nearby application for it. If you have a municipal swimming pool to heat – or something like that – it’s great. Warm water doesn’t necessarily travel that well. That’s why we heat it in our apartments as opposed to (elsewhere).

I think it’s a great idea for heat recapture but the better we are at (energy efficiency), the less hot water you’re probably going to be generating.

(Energy storage) is sort of one of the wholly grails really. Can we make storage of electricity cheaper, more efficient and more ubiquitous? And there are lots of nifty things going on to potentially make that happen.

What’s going on around the plug-in hybrid stuff is very exciting. Just the notion that you could repurpose the batteries in a plug-in hybrid both as a source of energy when you need it for the grid as well as a source of locomotion. If you divide cost between them (it) becomes a lot more economically viable because you got two users.

Fuel cell technology is getting better and better. There’s flywheel technology, which has been around for years and people are tweaking that.

DCDF: What do you think about using flywheel-based UPS units in data centers?

CP: We have flywheel technology up in our data center in Quincy, Wash. We’ve used that as a UPS as opposed to batteries. That’s the first facility that we built and designed from the ground up. Up until then (December 2007) we’ve been using existing buildings.

DCDF: Is the push to reduce CO2 emissions driven by anticipation of new regulations?

We’re coming into it being an environmentally responsible company. We started measuring our footprint in 2006.

We’re not a particularly carbon-intensive industry, so we’re doing this in advance of regulation. Where we’ll feel some impact in the future is probably related to our electricity, but we really think that there’s an advantage to staying ahead of the curve in terms of measuring this stuff and looking for ways to reduce.

It’s good for business. It’s good for the bottom line. It’s the right thing to do in terms of getting ourselves to 80-percent reduction in CO2 by 2050, which is where we need to go.

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