Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Carbon Neutral - How to work it out?

[orchardhosting]

Hi,
I'd like to offer our clients the option of having a carbon neutral server or hosting account.

Now, the first step to being greener is to install more energy efficient hardware, but, this is debatable as there is carbon footprint to consider from the manufacturing process of the new hardware, so I'll ignore that for now.

Without convincing the data centre to use nothing but wind/solar/tidal power, which isn't an option, I'll have to offset the carbon usage by buying carbon credits.

But firstly, I need to know how much the following server configuration or similar would consume and then I can work out energy usage per year.

Dell R200
Intel DualCore Xeon X3065 2.33Ghz
250GB x2
4GB

Figures vary wildly on the internet for average server consumption as there is all sorts to consider such as cooling costs etc.

Does anyone know a fairly accurate figure for consumption?

[Jamie Edwards]

Originally Posted by orchardhosting

Without convincing the data centre to use nothing but wind/solar/tidal power, which isn't an option, I'll have to offset the carbon usage by buying carbon credits.

Isn't the general public of the opinion that buying carbon credits isn't really carbon neutralisation, and instead just defers the inevitable footprint (therefore, it won't really work as a marketing tactic)?

[orchardhosting]

Originally Posted by Jamie Edwards

Isn't the general public of the opinion that buying carbon credits isn't really carbon neutralisation, and instead just defers the inevitable footprint (therefore, it won't really work as a marketing tactic)?

That's a very interesting point, and there is much debate whether it works or not. But surely carbon offsets do, however, raise awareness about lowering the green house gasses world total? So it would be better than nothing.....

[orchardhosting]

Got a result from data centre stating that these sort of servers typically use around 0.2-0.7 Amps so will do some calculations.