Potential CO2 mitigation in digital ecosystems

Carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases (GHS) that is widely blamed for climate change. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is becoming one of the most challenging global issues. Increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere is primarily attributed to fossil fuel burning. There is a need for better planning of the electricity generation capacity expansion to meet the power demand, which powers the Internet´s routers and data centres, as well as to achieve an overall reduction in CO₂ emissions. The data centres, networking, cloud computing resources should reduce their carbon footprint in order to have a positive impact for the cloud computing service providers and the customers. We try to develop a linear programming model to evaluate the effectiveness of possible CO₂ mitigation for the brown energy (non-renewable energy) in the Internet.