Regardless of what type of carbon trading plan Congress ultimately comes up with, Yahoo! won’t be a player in the greenhouse gas (GHG) credit-trading game to achieve its carbon-neutral goal.

The company just announced that it will no longer purchase any carbon offsets as part of its strategy to become a carbon-neutral computer organization.

Instead, the company intends to rely on purchasing power from renewable energy suppliers and investing in energy-efficient data processing technologies.

To do all this, the company is building a new data processing center outside of Buffalo, NY, so it can rely totally on hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls. That right there eliminates most of its GHG emissions and need for any carbon credits.

Then to make this new data center most efficient, Yahoo! will use 90% of that power to run its servers at the Lockport, NY facility. Only 10% will be used for cooling, an industry first, according to Yahoo! The best other companies have achieved is a 50/50 split in powering servers vs. cooling them.

The company is investing in modern Green IT equipment instead of relying on carbon credits because, “We believe creating highly-efficient data centers will have a greater long-term, direct impact on the environment” and this will give Yahoo! a leadership role in combating climate change, says Yahoo! co-founder David Filo.

The reason Yahoo! won’t need so much power for cooling at its Lockport, NY data center is because the company’s building is configured to draw in the outside air in the Buffalo area to handle 100% of server cooling duties. This is achieved by a new design that Yahoo! says resembles a chicken coop. The company calls its new building design the Yahoo! Computing Coop.

The Yahoo! carbon neutral announcement is here and its blog is here.

Tags: carbon credits, carbon neurtral, carbon-neutral, data centers, energy efficiency, GHG, Green IT, Yahoo!