Image via WikipediaWhen the team and I decided to "go green" when we launched the new brand and service level we weren't exactly sure where to start. Should we green the office, our product line, everything? After some analysis we decided to attack the problem incrementally starting with our product offering since it would have the largest positive impact, or in the green vernacular zero impact.
The US Department of Energy has a list of certified carbon off-set programs from various providers here. The great thing about some of these companies is that they have tools to help you calculate your usage. When we got down in the details of determining our use we had a number of challenges because in our business we use various providers where the majority of our usage is on their cloud infrastructure. We reached out to some of them and they were very helpful. As it turns out, most of these businesses know intimately how much usage each node/device can handle because they must determine the profit per device, an essential component in their business model. Once we had the totals we converted our usage to "server equivalents" and used a nifty tool I found on Dell's website that provides a holistic view of energy consumption in a data center. We also compared our results with the calculator found on Terrapass. We took our findings to NativeEnergy and will buy our carbon off-sets monthly. We could do annually but we hope to grow month over month and want to make 12 bite sized purchases of off-sets than 1 huge one at the end of the year. Besides, we want to make a difference today not in a year.
So why did we choose NativeEnergy? To be honest several people on the team love Cliff and Stoneyfield products. Both use NateiveEnergy and one of their programs was with Stoneyfield. Here are some other sites/blogs we looked at in our quest to be carbon neutral:
Comments, Questions, Ideas-- Bring it.
Tim Symchych
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