Yahoo! has announced along with New York Governor David Patterson and Senator Chuck Schumer in Buffalo, New York plans to build a new data center in New York as one of the greenest and most energy-efficient in the world. It will be powered by renewable hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls and 90% of that energy will power the servers. The Bufalo data center will have a unique building design called the Yahoo! Computing Coop which resembles a chicken coop to take advantage of the climate in Buffalo and use 100% outside air to cool the servers.

Yahoo! built the first green data center in Washington two years ago and has saved energy consumption by 40-50%. Taking advantage of natural resources to power and cool the data centers can make a huge impact as it takes a tremendous amount of resources to keep the servers up and running 24/7 for 365 days a year.

Theres only one week left for Yahoo!’s Make it Green campaign! If you havent heard, The campaign encourages people to submit a green idea that can improve lives and help our planet. Submit your idea before June 30th and if it gets chosen, your product could be sold in stores and you can get a share of the sales in addition to $2500!

http://green.yahoo.com/makeitgreen

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal for a mandatory composting and recycling law has just been approved by the Board of Supervisors 9-2. The law will be put into place this fall and requires every residence and business in San Francisco to have three separate color coded bins, blue for recycling, green for composting, and black for trash. Failure to properly sort your trash can actually result in a fine after repeated warnings. The point isnt to fine people but this is a great mandate to enforce people to recycle and compost. For example, I live in South San Francisco, and we dont even have composting recycling available. Many bay area cities actually dont either so this will be a good example set for other cities to follow and start to implement a composting program.

via SFGate

US Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winning scientist Steven Chu came up with a new plan to paint roofs and pavements white or light colored in the US to cut greenhouse gas emissions. With this change to roofs and roads, it can have the equivalent effect of taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years. By reflecting sunlight back into space, it can increase the reflectivity of the Earth. It can also reduce the amount of electricity used for air conditioning if houses are cooler. Painting cars a lighter color can also save your energy bill for air conditioning with a similar effect.

This is an interesting idea that sounds logical but why hasnt it been implemented for all this time? Actually, there are white roofs in different parts of the world and even in Southern Florida and the Caribbeans. Black roofs can trap in the heat in the winter but it actually takes more energy to cool a house as opposed to warming a house. In cold places, the roof is often covered in snow in the winter so it is technically white anyways. The issue with white roofs, however, is that they can get dirty easily and after a while, they wouldnt really be white anymore. A dirty roof is also not very attractive as opposed to a black roof, which would look a lot better regardless of whether it was clean or dirty. I assume this is probably the reason why roofs are black.

via Yahoo Green and The Independent and RTN Roofing Systems