Backup at Onlime is green backup
It is not always easy to be green, or is it? Backup at Onlime is green backup.
This post is from 2016. Some figures and schemes mentioned below are historical — the PSO levy (abolished in Denmark in 2022), the Norway–Sweden 2020 certificate cooperation, and the CO2neutral membership. Today, Onlime’s data center runs on 100% Norwegian hydropower secured through Guarantees of Origin.
Most people would like to enjoy the benefits of clean renewable energy, but it is not always easy for the average person to generate electricity from renewable sources. You don’t exactly have the option of putting up a wind turbine in your back garden, mounting solar panels on the roof, or running an electrolysis process in the garage to produce hydrogen.
Instead you can buy energy certificates that guarantee the same amount of energy you use has been produced from renewable sources. Once the energy has been produced, it is impossible to track where the renewable energy is, since all electricity in the grid is the same.
What is a green energy certificate?
The more certificates that get bought, the more support there is for green energy. In Denmark you cannot buy green energy certificates, because here at home we have the PSO (Public Service Obligation), which is part of your electricity bill. You can still support green energy by buying programs or services from companies that guarantee a new green energy certificate is created every time a unit of electricity is produced.
One example is that Onlime is a member of CO2neutraltwebsite.com, which compensates for the energy use of our website by setting renewable energy projects in motion.
Read more: CO2neutral
Norway and Sweden’s target before 2020
Norway and Sweden are cooperating until at least 2020 to run their energy production on green certificates. Both countries have abolished public subsidies and support schemes in order to focus on green energy certificates.
Their combined goal is to increase energy production from renewable sources by 28.4 TWh. On top of this, Norway aims to be fully CO2-neutral by 2030.
How is renewable energy produced in Norway?
The way much of the energy in Norway and Sweden is produced is actually quite simple.
Thanks to Norway’s geology, with its large differences in elevation among other things, water can be moved around as needed. The water is transported up into a reservoir on a mountain when electricity prices are low, which is usually at night.
That way, when electricity prices are high, the sluices up on the mountain can be opened so the water runs down and drives turbines that generate electricity. No fossil fuels are used to produce the energy once the plant is set up. It is clever, and you could call it an energy store.
In a sense, Norway has a backup of energy, so electricity can always be generated as needed.
So where does the energy get used?
Since we in Denmark import energy from Norway, the energy is used by you in this very second as you read this post. The energy is used in every electronic device, for example the charger for your phone, your computer, the lights in your house or apartment, and a thousand other places.
The green energy from Norway is also used to power the data center where we store our customers’ files in Norway. And there are a lot of servers, so they need a lot of energy. Even though 98.9% of all energy in Norway is generated from renewable hydropower, there will still be some energy mixed in from across Northern Europe (and that is not 100% renewable).
How do we make sure our servers run on 100% renewable energy?
We do it by using 100% Norwegian hydropower, secured through Guarantees of Origin. That guarantees all the energy flowing into the data center comes from an energy source with the highest environmental standard, namely hydropower produced in Norway.
Read more: Security and privacy policy at Onlime.
What do online backup and green energy have in common?
It is never a bad idea to have a backup. That goes for your digital life as well as other things.
When it comes to energy, a backup can save a lot of money, since you avoid paying for the expensive electricity produced from fossil fuels, for example from a coal power plant. If you have a backup of your data, you are protected and save a lot of money and time on recreating lost documents in case something goes wrong and your PC breaks.
You know the situation where the power goes out and everything goes dark.
It is unpleasant, but actually also quite exciting. In that very moment we realize how dependent we are on energy. That is why it matters that we have enough energy sources to produce electricity when it is needed. By being an Onlime customer, you support data centers where the electricity consumed is bought through green energy certificates.
The more green energy certificates that are bought, the more you support renewable energy sources, and together we reduce fossil electricity production.
