Greenpeace has re-ignited the debate over the environmental impact of cloud computing with its latest report on energy consumption and energy sourcing in the data centers of some of the largest tech companies.  Its new report, How Clean is Your Cloud?, looks at the data center deployments of 14 of the leading players in the market.

The report is particularly critical of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, identifying them as major suppliers who are expanding their data center capacity “without adequate regard to source of electricity,” relying “heavily on dirty energy to power their clouds”.  On the other hand, it praises Google and Yahoo for the investments in renewable energy.  Its rapprochement with Facebook also continues, as it commends the social media giant’s decision to develop its next data center in Sweden, where it will be able draw on renewable energy sources for its power.

Both Apple and Amazon have reasserted the green credentials of their data centers and of cloud computing in general.  However, according to a report in The Guardian, Amazon appears to be simply retreading arguments for the general benefits of cloud computing, while sidestepping the issue of energy sourcing altogether.  This rather misses the point of Greenpeace’s criticism.

More interestingly, Apple has responded by providing more details on what it is actually doing in its flagship data center in Maiden, North Carolina.   Apple argues that its new data center will be highly energy efficient, will use a significant amount of renewable energy, and overall will use only 20% of the 100 megawatts (MW) attributed to it by Greenpeace.   In turn this is putting the spotlight on Greenpeace’s method for ranking data centers.

However, Apple would seem to be suffering in part from inflating its own claims to being green.  It’s hard to see how it can claim to building the greenest data center ever if it is still relying even partially on coal-generated electricity – Verne Global, for example, likely feels it has a much better claim on that score.  Interestingly, Apple now says that its next data center in Oregon will be powered by 100% renewable energy, something Greenpeace hadn’t allowed for in its rankings.

Greenpeace can claim that getting Apple to talk more openly about energy use in its data center is already a step forward.  But until there’s an agreement on data transparency and metrics, such partial disclosures tend to confuse rather than clarify the debate.  The focus should therefore be on getting cloud computing providers to be more open about the actual energy efficiency and environmental impact of their data centers.

As Greenpeace says, data centers are the factories of the digital world. So it’s interesting to see Akamai, the cloud and Internet platform provider, gaining credit from Greenpeace for being the first major players to report on its Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE).  CUE, developed by the Green Grid, provides a means of assessing a data centers overall emissions performance, including its primary energy sources.  Only when all cloud providers enable such transparency will customers be able to make informed decision on whether they are procuring cloud services that are truly green.

It’s always interesting to see a project you’ve been tracking for some time come to fruition.  I’ve been following Verne Global, and its plans for a data center campus in Iceland, for almost two years, so it was rewarding to see its progress first-hand at the official launch event last month.

The Verne Global data center is based on a former NATO facility west of Reykjavik, near Keflavik International Airport.  Iceland’s advantages as a staging post between North America and Europe are important, but it’s the availability of a dual-sourced renewable energy supply that makes the project unique.  Iceland’s electricity is provided 100% by hydropower and geothermal energy.  In addition, Iceland’s temperate climate enables year round free air cooling without the need for chillers, helping the site to operate at a power usage effectiveness (PUE, a measure of how efficiently a data center uses energy) of around 1.2.

The data center’s location provides strong green credentials, but it also offers important commercial advantages.  Iceland’s renewable energy resources mean a stable and cheap source of electricity for data center operators and other businesses.  Landsvirkjun, the local utility, is able to offer up to 20-year terms for electricity rates and has, for example, been offering a public rate of $43 per megawatt for 12 years.  This allows Verne Global to claim that the total TCO for its customers could be 60% lower than a similar deployment in London.

The choice of location has been combined with an innovative approach to data center development through a close partnership with Colt.  I’ve written previously about Colt’s approach to modular data center design, and the Keflavik data center is its first public showcase, though it has since announced another data center customer in UK luxury car maker Jaguar Land Rover.  The partnership with Verne Global also involves Colt installing a new point-of-presence (POP) for its Pan-European communications network within the facility.  Having had a chance to see the actual data center and talk to Colt’s engineering and management team, I understand more clearly how far its offering differs from containerized approaches to modular design.  “Pre-fabricated data centers” is perhaps a better term for what Colt is doing, building the components at its factory in the north of England and shipping them for rapid installation on-site.  Colt’s approach is also modular in that it supports an incremental build-out of the data center in 500 square-meter units, which is also helping Verne Global manage its capital investment.

Another key stakeholder in this venture is the Icelandic government.  During the launch, the local mayor and an Icelandic government minister gave speeches that showed their clear enthusiasm for the project.  Iceland is keen to exploit its natural advantages to develop a large-scale data center industry and has been clearing away regulatory and tax issues that might hamper expansion of the sector.  Iceland, of course, was one of the countries most badly hit by the banking crisis and it is now betting on data centers as a more stable basis for the future growth.  The availability of the new Emerald Express Trans-Atlantic Cable System, a 5,200 km ultra-high bandwidth link between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Iceland, planned for late 2012, will help Iceland and Verne Global better target U.S. data center business.

Today, Iceland’s energy surplus supports a power-hungry aluminum smelting industry.  The government hopes that in future, processing bits may be equally important to the island’s economy.

The success of the cleantech industry will ultimately be measured by two yardsticks.  One, of course, is its ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver environmentally friendly and sustainable forms of energy.  The other is its economic impact and its ability to generate new businesses and new jobs.

This second facet has become an increasingly important measure as the global economy struggles to recover from the economic downturn.  My colleague Richard Martin has written about how this debate is evolving in terms of the industry as a whole and the likely impact on U.S. jobs.

A recent blog piece by Scott Nicholson, a data scientist at social media site LinkedIn, provides a different type of evidence for continued growth in cleantech jobs.  LinkedIn was engaged by the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) to help broaden the Council’s understanding of what’s happening in the U.S. jobs market as part of its annual Economic Report of the President.

LinkedIn currently has around 150 million members, but the study focused on U.S.  members who have been part of the network since 2007 in order to avoid bias related to the rapid growth in membership in recent years.  The study analyzed job movements of tens of millions of members between 2007 and 2011.

The analysis showed that the fastest-growing industry sector, based on members’ profile information, was Renewables and Environment at +49.2%, ahead of Internet (+24.6%) and Online Publishing (+24.3%).  In comparison the fastest-shrinking industries included Newspapers (-28.4%), Retail (-15.5%), Building Materials (-14.2%), and Automotive (-12.8%).  The study also looked at the volumes of job gains/losses by industry.  Again Renewables showed one of the largest growth rates, alongside Internet, Hospitals & Healthcare, Health, Wellness & Fitness, Oil & Energy, and IT.  Retail, Construction, Telecommunications, Banking and Automotive had the largest volume of job losses between 2007 and 2011.

The LinkedIn study is interesting in its own right – even if it can only give a very partial glimpse into what is happening in the jobs market.  It’s also fascinating because it provides further evidence of how our connectedness in a global world is itself becoming an important means of understanding how the economy and our society are changing.  That’s another reason why utilities, government and other organizations involved in the cleantech industry need to see social media as not only a communications platform but also a valuable source of insight in a complex world.

Following on my recent blog I am returning to the concept of the city-as-platform. The idea was raised by Chicago City CTO, John Tolva, in an excellent review of Chicago’s open data projects, and starts with the provision of an open application programming interface (API) to the city’s data portal. Developers can use this to receive a continually updated stream of city data without manually refreshing their applications each time changes happen in the feed.  As Tolva says, this changes the city from a static provider of data to a kind of platform for application development. In turn, this leads to a rethinking of government’s role in the smart city, moving from being a prime developer to providing a foundation for others to build upon.

A number of other projects can be considered as developing a view of the city-as-platform including:

• The SmartSantander sensor network trial in Santander, Spain is looking to provide a common platform for a range of sensor-based applications. Barcelona is developing something similar with its Urban Labs pilots in the 22@Barcelona development. A number of start-ups are developing solutions for this new architecture, including Urbiotica with its “City Operating Systems” for sensor network management.
• The integrated networking services that are a core part of the Songdo IBD development in Korea are designed on a platform concept.  Cisco is building on its experience with the Songdo network to position the Cisco Unified Service Delivery Platform as an IT and communications platform for city-scale developments.
• Living PlanIT’s Urban Operating System a distributed middleware platform that provides monitoring and control over a network of intelligent devices, some of which may be buried in the city infrastructure.
• IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities is providing the basis for a number of smart city projects, as in Zhenjiang, China and in Rio de Janeiro, where it’s the foundation for a wider range of customer-driven City applications

The technical architectures and commercial models behind these approaches differ considerably, but they all aim to provide a development platform on which city agencies, suppliers and third-parties can build new applications and services for city management and citizen engagement.

In our model for smart cities, we refer to these multiple capabilities as the Smart City Operating System  (SCOS).  The SCOS is not a single technical solution.  Instead, it consists of a number of different approaches to finding a means of making the smart city more than the sum of its parts.  To do that, it has to draw together diverse and ubiquitous systems. It is therefore not a single unified system itself but more a “platform of platforms,” acting as a distributed middleware for linking different application areas – what engineering consultancy Arup calls an “urban information architecture.” The city-as-platform concept also offers an alternative to thinking of the smart city as either a top-down or bottom-up project. One criticism of the smart city concept is that it is driven by a vision of grand projects suited to large property developers and global ICT companies. The early focus on smart cities was certainly more top-down as a result of the attention paid to ambitious new developments like Masdar and Songdo and also to the strong support offered by the likes of IBM and Cisco.  The rapid adoption of the smartphone as an intelligent end-user device and the growing importance of the Apple and Android apps markets has encouraged a resurgence of a more bottom-up view of the potential of urban computing platforms.

These different perspectives on city technology echo long-running debates about the nature of city planning, in particular Jane Jacobs’ famous counter-blast to the centralizing, mechanistic view of much 20^th century urban planning. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs helped restore an appreciation of the messy, human, dynamic, and highly contingent, aspects of city living. The city-as-platform concept is a way for cities to encourage bottom up innovation while still making the necessary investments in the large-scale operational and infrastructure systems needed to meet the challenges of the future.