Climate change is a big deal and at RNEI we want to lead the way in reducing our impact on the planet while continuing to broadcast radio shows on shortwave.

Shortwave is a very power hungry medium and it is certainly a problem while electricity generation is dominated by fossil fuels. This page will explore the climate impact of RNEI and look at ways to offset it so we are doing less damage to our planet.

Emissions

Broadcasting is our main source of CO2 emissions and we sadly do not have a choice in how the energy is generated for the transmitters we rent and we are not in a financial position to rent only low / zero carbon powered transmitters. Below is a chart of the emissions from each transmitter while broadcasting RNEI during 2022.

It is important to note that the WRMI and Unique Radio transmitter remains active if we do or do not rent it, however the Channel 292 transmitter is turned on and off as demand arises meaning that its emissions are directly our responsibility. This equates to roughly 0.5 tonnes of CO2 a year being created directly upon our requests for 3 hours a month of broadcast time from Channel 292.

There are probably a smaller amount of emissions created with the QSL card process too.
The RNEI ‘studio’ is on a green power plan meaning that every kW used is regenerated into the national electricity system using renewable energy.
Our server for this website, “Ingrid”, is based in Sweden, a country emitting only 26g of CO2 per kWh and our storage server which holds backups and show files, “Lea”, is in France which generates 57g of CO2 per kWh. Both of these are VPS servers. This means that they are on a master system with a high core count Xeon processor. These servers use roughly 600-800W/hour and are shared between hundreds of users. If it is assumed that 100 people are using the server that comes out to a upper end of 8w/h = 70kW/year aka 4KG CO2 for France, 1.8KG CO2 for Sweden. It’s safe to say that these are a tiny fraction of our current emissions.

Offsetting our emissions

We have decided to invest in trees as a way to offset our carbon emissions. While this is not idea compared to reducing our output, we don’t have the option to change how Florida and Germany generate electricity currently.

This page will be updated further as we invest in carbon offsetting via trees. We are looking into planting fruit trees in places that need them which is both helps a community and the climate at the same time!