Photo credit Enigma Photos

My guest on this podcast is Chris Preist. Chris is a principal scientist at HP Labs, based at HPL's European research centre in Bristol, UK. HP Labs and Forum for the Future, together published a report called Climate Futures(6.7MB pdf). This report goes through 5 possible scenarios for how the world will respond to the climate changes we are seeing, or as they say on the Forum for the Future page:

Climate Futures analyses the social, political, economic and psychological consequences of climate change and describes how different global responses to the problem could lead to five very different worlds by 2030.

Chris was one of the authors of the report so I asked him to come on the show to discuss it and what followed was a fascinating discussion.

Welcome to the it@cork pre-conference podcasts. In this podcast series, kindly sponsored by GreenMonk the Energy and Sustainability practice of Industry Analyst firm RedMonk, we are talking to some of the speakers in the upcoming it@cork Green IT Conference. In this week's podcast, I interviewed René Wienholtz. René is the CTO of Strato - Strato is one of the largest hosting co.'s in the world and they are completely carbon neutral - without buying any carbon offsets! René will be speaking about how he managed this at the conference and I asked him to come on the podcast to give us a quick preview of his presentation. Download the entire interview here (8.6mb mp3)

Episode 4 of the GreenMonk Podcasts - 36 mins 28 secs

My guest on this podcast is Strato’s Executive Director for Information Technology and Innovation Rene Wienholtz.

Strato are Europe’s second largest hosting company and Strato are also carbon neutral! Amazingly they achieved this without buying any offsets. How did they do it?

Listen to René explain it.

Here are the questions I asked René and the approx. times I asked them:


Can you tell us something about your own background first and who are Strato? - 00:34

If I heard you correctly you are now the largest hosting company in Europe? - 02:28

You guys are a bit like RackSpace in the sense that you don't do co-location, you rent space on your servers, id that right? - 02:38

You mentioned that you decided to re-architect the setup in Strato and reduce your carbon footprint, was this for environmental reasons or business reasons? - 03:34

Questions from readers:




Do you use underfloor plenums as well to direct the air to the cold aisles? - 21:47

Can you talk to us too about the energy savings you are getting from buying CO2 free energy? - 25:44

Have you negotiated a set price from your clean energy supplier for a set period? - 29:36

Can you tell me how long this price is guaranteed for? - 30:15

Have you had any independent 3rd party certify that you are carbon neutral? - 30:27



More questions from readers: