As the day-to-day use of ICT continues to rise, concern is growing about the carbon emissions indirectly caused by the manufacture of the electronics that litter our lives and the steady rise in the electricity required to power our personal devices and data centres. However, the debate should be less about ICT’s tiny contribution to global warming and more about how ICT can be used to reduce carbon emissions across society.
Over the last two years there has been a lot of debate about what the embedded energy of a PC or server is compared with how much power it uses. I have crunched the numbers and believe that the figure for a server is about 1,000,000 Watt-hours (1MWh). Here is how I worked it out, and why it means that you should sweat the desktops but replace the servers.
Back in February this year I tool part in one of a series of video debates on green IT hosted by the BCS as one of four “industry experts”. The topic was “IT policies and your green credentials”. Watch the video here…
The Government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme aims to reduce absolute carbon dioxide emissions from large non-energy intensive organisations in both the public and private sector. In this article I discuss the impact of the CRC on data centres and why it will likely be counter-productive in the context of reducing carbon emissions.
A few weeks ago I was party to an initial ‘getting together’ in BAFTA of some key greenie people from the IT industry (me and Emma Fryer, author of many of Intellect’s thought-leadership documents and responses to government policy in the field of carbon reduction) with leaders from the media and entertainment industry. One of the contenscious topics is around the environmental damage of CDs compared with downloads. In this article I will calculate both using common sense and first principals.
People keep going around and around in circles on the debate of whether you should replace servers and desktops sooner rather than later when you take into account the improvements in energy efficiency in recent years combined with the embedded energy cost of manufacture of computers. So, I decided to get out my calculator and [...]
As more people “wake up” to climate change we are seeing a lot of effort put towards starting to reduce our collective green-house gas emissions. Unfortunately however, there seems to be a lack of quantitative data being applied to many of these efforts, and consequently the media, individuals and business are often focusing on the [...]
I will be carrying on with the “Greening the data centre” series soon, but in the interim several people have recently been asking me about the concept of utility computing, and it has been a major theme of recent IT conferences. Despite the attention the concept is receiving there is still a lot of misunderstanding, [...]
I’ve written before about going green being important for business, but now I’d to focus on one area: the data centre. There has been a lot of interest recently in the topic of “green” data centres. however, many organisations still seem to feel that being more energy efficient in is just pandering to the general [...]
In March, with the promise of Summer around the corner, I was eying up my somewhat battered bicycle and contemplating last year’s resolution to actually use it to cycle to work when the weather was pleasant. Not only would it be better for me, but as the boss of a company with a serious commitment [...]