Green IT - excellent session. So much information I can only reflect some of it - most of the time I was too interested to take notes!
What's the problem? Mainly CO2 emissions. Must be cut by 60 – 80% by 2050. Kyoto recommendations come nowhere near this. Cuts can’t be made by changes on supplier side ie on power generation - there must be a cut in demand. A low carbon economy will not be business as usual!
ICT accounts for c2% of carbon emissions same as aviation industry - but, there are lots of inefficiencies so savings are possible. IT will also assist in reducing demnd in other areas.
How is the 2% made up?
Printing 6% (NB Printing not printers – ie paper )
LAN and office telecoms 7% - look at power consumption of boxes, switches etc, don’t put in capacity until you need it
Mobile telecoms 9%
Fixed line 15%
Servers 23% includes cooling
PCs, monitors 39%
Focus should be on PCs, servers and printing
Ewaste - Fastest growing waste stream on the planet. 460k pPC come to end of their life every day. 550m mobile phones will be replaced this year - only 5-10% will be reused.
Need a recycling policy.
Think life cycle - for the embodied energy of a PC, 80% is in its manufacture and distribution and only 20% in its use.
Some suggested actions:
Define a policy and strategy
Start measuring and analysing
Green the staff – it’s mostly a behavourial challenge
Life life on the edge – dare to switch things off
Begin the journey from always on to always available
Take out all machines not doing anything in data centre
Consider energy at every decision level.
Take a holistic approach to reducing IT cooling and power loads
Print less - educate staff, enforce duplex printing, drop banner pages
Green procurement - look at environmental assessments of vendors
Create asset dispostion policy
HE day was very good. finished off with a meal at a restuarant on the mountain - Montjuc - with fantastic views over the City. There were firework displays going off everywhere because it was a bank holiday - but no-one could tell us what the holiday was!
3 comments:
Bank holiday probably Monday following Pentecost Sunday. Will IT services start including energy costs/off-sets in cost of ownership/recurrent funding calculations?
I think that you will find that avaiation is about 6% of carbon emissions when the emission at altitude is taken into account.
On a more pessimistic note carbon reductions need to be more than 60% by 2050 according to some researchers such as the Tyndall Centre for climate research at University of MAnchester 80% by 2030. George Monbiot argued for a reduction of around 98% and demonstrates how such reduction is feasible in his book.
May I suggest that your IT and aviation sector approach is limiting solutions. Significant reductions need to be made by looking at all systems simultaneously; for example by using teleconferencing etc to eliminate air travel.
Thnaks for the stimulating thoughts.
Hi - thanks for the comment - the 2% figure is widely quoted by analysts and I was really using to get people to wake up to the fact that we in IT really need to do something. I couldn't cover the whole talk in this post, but the holistic approach of looking at all systems and processes was discussed, and I agree with you, it's the only way to go.
Cheers
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