Our business runs on electricity, which obviously has environmental consequences. We're concerned about pollution, energy security, and climate change, so we're taking steps to make sure that our company is as environmentally friendly as possible.
The most important things we do are save energy where possible, support renewable power, and offset our carbon emissions to make sure that our company is "carbon neutral". In fact, as we explain below, it's not unreasonable to say that our business is completely powered by renewable energy. We think this makes Tiger Technologies one of your best choices if you're concerned about the environment.
Saving energy is an obvious step. We buy only "Energy Star" servers, desktop computers, monitors and printers; we turn off devices that aren't in use; we configure our desktop computers to save energy by turning off idle monitors; we use fluorescent light bulbs and auto-adjusting thermostats... you know the drill. We take it seriously.
No matter how much we save, all Web hosting companies still use quite a bit of energy. In particular, powering and cooling servers takes lots of electricity. Each year, our business directly consumes about 25,000 kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity and 850 therms of natural gas, producing more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide. If we include indirect emissions (generated by activities like manufacturing and shipping the servers we use, the occasional business trip, and so forth), the totals are probably over 50 tons of CO₂ annually.
That's a heavy environmental impact. Instead of ignoring it, we've decided to do something about it. Each year, we contribute enough to the Carbonfund.org renewable energy program to offset more than 65 tons of carbon dioxide. That's equivalent to over 107,000 kWh of renewable electricity.
Carbonfund.org uses the money to fund zero-emission wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass renewable energy programs, either through direct investments or through renewable energy certificates (aka "green tags"). The projects are certified by Environmental Resources Trust or Green-e.
These contributions make our business "carbon neutral", meaning that we offset (reduce) more CO₂ than we produce. It also means that through our efforts, more renewable electricity is pumped into the electric "grid" than we use (even though our servers still receive their actual power from the standard reliable electricity grid).
One possible answer is that our offices are near San Francisco where it's foggy even in the summer — and our customers wouldn't like it if our servers stopped working because we haven't seen the sun in a week. For stable operation, we really need the reliability of the electricity grid (with robust battery backup systems and on-site generators, of course).
The real answer is that it makes more sense to invest in large-scale projects. As Carbonfund.org puts it, "it's more cost effective and better for the environment to build a 100 MW wind energy farm in the Midwest than a 5 kW windmill in your backyard." In terms of greenhouse gases and other pollution, it doesn't matter all that much how or where clean energy is generated.
So we could try to generate 107,000 kWh of solar electricity on our rooftop, or we could buy renewable energy certificates that make it cost effective for a company to build solar panels in the desert that generate the same 107,000 kWh. Either way, 107,000 kWh of extra renewable electricity is generated and 65 tons of CO₂ are saved.
(Grid operators are legally required to buy renewable energy if it's available at market rates. Renewable energy certificates pay the difference between "dirty" and "clean" power generation costs, making it possible for companies to sell renewable power at "dirty" market rates. Every clean kilowatt funded by a renewable energy certificate means one less dirty kilowatt in the grid.)
So while we don't have solar panels directly on our rooftop, our Carbonfund.org contributions make sure that we're generating more renewable energy than we use. In a very real sense, that means our business is powered by renewable energy.
Yes, there is! Occasionally, we're asked why people should choose us instead of just hosting a Web site on their own home Internet connection. Besides the obvious reasons (setting it up is annoying, you have to become a security expert, the power and connections aren't as reliable as a proper data center, etc.), one thing that's often overlooked is that the electricity used by hosting it yourself is probably more expensive than what we'd charge to host the same site.
Running a Web server requires a dedicated computer left on all the time, which probably consumes at least 50 watts of power even if the monitor is never turned on. That's 36 kWh per month. In our neighborhood, that much electricity would cost you $8.50 per month, which is more than we would charge to host the Web site. (This calculation is based on a Pacific Gas and Electric residential customer using 131% of "baseline" usage, which is $0.236 per kWh including taxes as of this writing. If you use more than 200% of your "baseline", which is not uncommon for people with air conditioning, the bill for those extra kWh would be $11.50 a month.)
And again, that doesn't include the environmental costs. If a computer hosts a single Web site, that site will use about 432 kWh per year, generating about .25 tons of CO₂. Because we host multiple Web sites on each server, each site uses only about 5 kWh and emits only .003 tons of CO₂ per year (this figure includes all the power we use: servers, desktop computers in our billing department, cooling, and so forth). Even if we didn't fund renewable power and offset our CO₂ emissions, it would still be 80 times more "environmentally friendly" to have us host the Web site.