Rackspace Moves to Offset Emissions
Rackspace Moves to Offset Emissions
December 19, 2007: Managed hosting provider Rackspace has announced that it is taking more steps down the green path by supporting NativeEnergy in the pursuit of more renewable energy projects.
NativeEnergy is a marketer of renewable energy credits and carbon offsets, and a firm RackSpace has aligned itself with via its GreenSpace initiative. The premise of the project is RackSpace will purchase carbon offsets on the proviso that two new renewable energy projects are launched in the US with the proceeds.
In 2008 the two projects focused on will be the Penn England Family Dairy Waste to Energy Project, and the Farmer Owned Distributed Small Scale Wind Project in Minnesota. Penn England will use the funds to ramp up a manure digester on this 700 cow dairy farm that displaces onsite fossil fuel use and emissions of methane, while the wind project will support the sale and installation of German-designed 40 kW Aeroman wind turbines, remanufactured and customised for Midwest conditions.
The GreenSpace program was kicked off in June this year with a view to reducing emissions by conserving energy and increasing awareness of climate change. The company says a key component of the initiative was to use NativeEnergy to offset carbon emissions produced by customer servers managed within Rackspace’s data centres.
NativeEnergy claims that through its GreenSpace program RackSpace has offset the emissions added by all new servers deployed in 2007. The company currently adds hundreds of new servers a month to its US-based data centres, and pledges to continue offsetting carbon emissions for each new customer server brought online.
“[Rackspace’s] support of these family farm-based renewable energy projects will help farmers reduce their long-term electricity costs, while helping stabilise the electricity grid with distributed, small-scale power generation,” said Tom Boucher, president and CEO, NativeEnergy. “NativeEnergy’s clients have built 18 turbines in the last year, and with Rackspace’s help, we expect to build thirty or more in 2008.”
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