A first application of the Carbon Neutral Certification Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the Carbon Neutral Certification Working Group is a calculator for the carbon emissions of a data center. We chose data centers as our first application because:
- Data center have high energy use. Energy is a data center's highest operating expense and could be about half of all its expenses. (Uptime Institute's Simple Model for Determing True Total Cost of Ownership for Data Centers.)
- Globally, data centers use 103 Tera Watt hours of electricity (Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates), about 1% of the global electricity output. This is equivalent to the energy use of 17 million American households (NYTimes.com) with a total carbon emissions footprint on par with those of airlines (BBC.com)
- Data center energy use can obtained from utility energy bills, many of which are electronically available via the Green Button data standard.
- Major cloud services providers are focused on improving data center energy efficiency, both as a competitive advantage and as a way to meet their climate goals. Microsoft, for example, has committed to becoming carbon neutral, while Google has made both sigificant investments in data center efficiency and renewable energy.
Calculating a data center's carbon footprint will be done with smart contracts in a permissioned Hyperledger channel, as described in the the Carbon Neutral Certification Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The key inputs are:
- 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 purchased by the data center.
- Carbon offsets purchased by the data center.
As an example, the smart contract could