Airgead Studio

We have a pleasant announcement to make now.  We recently discovered that Steadfast Networks, the data centre that houses our servers in the US, has partnered with Carbonfund.org in order to reduce its carbon footprint.  It now purchases its own offsets for the things it cannot control (115 tonnes thus far) and has an impressive list of things it is doing to help the environment.

It has partnered with the Chicago Transit Authority to "help make public transportation a cheaper and easier option for its employees". Its building is highly engineered to ensure that it is as efficient as possible.  It buys direct from local vendors, who do their bit by delivering equipment themselves, without all the extra packaging.  It started a recycling program in the building to ensure that it, and others, do what they can to recycle (including old servers).  You can read more about it here if you are interested.

As you will have read in an earlier post, we were caught up in a forced change of electricity provider at the end of 2009.  We found out about it in late January 2010.  We signed the two year contract with AGL to provide 100% green electricity, then had to sit back and wait until the next meter read.  That occurred in mid-April 2010.

Once we were with AGL, we thought everything was fine.  That was until our first electricity bill arrived in late July.  While the amount of the bill seemed reasonable, I couldn't find any indication on it that we were on 100% green electricity.  Many phone calls later, it turned out there had been a mistake made when our account was set up, and we were on black electricity.  That has now been rectified, and I have an updated contract stating that we are on 100% green electricity from that date forward.  It did leave us in the position, however, of having had seven months worth of black electricity detracting from our green efforts (four months with Energy Australia as the emergency supplier, three months with AGL).