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Demystifying Green IT – Seeding Advantage
Published May 10, 2010
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As public and private organisations around the world seek to limit their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental impacts as part of “the sustainabil¬ity agenda,” information technology (IT) stands to make a significant contribution. Addressing the direct environmental by-products of IT use is one way that green IT solutions can help organisations reduce these emissions and address sustainability concerns. But an even bigger opportu¬nity lies in helping other industries in their response to climate change. IT solutions can eliminate or otherwise redirect busi¬ness activities that generate emissions, according to a new report by Booz & Company.
The need for increased efficiency and automation is spurring demand for IT equipment and services. As IT procurement officials and other IT practitioners seek to fill this demand, employing green IT strategies will help move their organisations that much farther down the path to realising their objectives for environmental responsibility and sustainability.
- What is green IT?
Global economic transforma¬tion has triggered the rapid diffusion and usage of IT across all sectors. Today, these technologies account for approximately 1.4 percent of global CO2 emissions.
IT service providers and manufactur¬ers are recognising the opportunities that exist—in both the business and the environmental sense—in develop¬ing technology solutions to help their organisations and the other 98.6 percent of GHG emitters clean up their act. “Estimates indi¬cate that by 2020, energy efficiencies in other industries that are enabled by information and communications technology (ICT) could yield carbon savings five times greater than the emissions of the entire ICT sector,” explained Ramez Shehadi, a partner at Booz & Company. These drivers have hastened the evolution of the green IT industry.
Green IT includes the IT products and practices that reduce environmental impacts either by leading to lower net emissions or by reducing waste by-products. Spending on green IT services is expected to rise significantly and quickly. In anticipation of this coming wave of IT investment, public and private organisations can adopt leading green IT policies and practices on two fronts: greening IT and going green through IT. The former seeks to reduce the environmental footprint of IT equipment needed to conduct business and the latter applies green IT solutions to organisations to make other aspects of their day-to-day activ¬ities more environmentally friendly.
- Greening IT:
The IT function plays a vital role in helping governments and corporations use IT more responsibly through energy-efficient technologies in procurement or by adopting practices that promote smarter energy use. The business opportunity lies in two major areas data centres and distributed IT.
- Data centre consolidation:
- Data centres use huge amounts of power; in 2006 they accounted for 1.5 percent of total U.S. energy consumption. Moreover, data centres are requiring more energy every year.
- Virtualisation is the process that takes applications and operating systems from multiple and often underutilised servers and packages them into virtual machines housed on a single server. It allows IT administrators to match computing needs to remotely stored hardware, enabling data centres to be consolidated, thereby reducing energy consumption. “Another applica¬tion of virtualisation technologies is cloud computing, in which customers typically lease the physical IT infra¬structure from a third-party service provider and use it on demand, which reduces energy consumption,” said Danny Karam, a senior associate at Booz & Company.
- Advanced cooling systems:
The power required to run cooling equipment represents roughly 40 percent of energy consumed in data centres. The figure is rapidly rising, elevating the urgency of improving cool¬ing efficiency.
- IT functions are using a number of techniques to reduce energy consumption:
- Optimising airflow in the data centre to reduce temperature, thereby reducing the amount of cooling required.
- Employing a hot/cold aisle configuration in which equipment racks are arranged in alternating rows of hot and cold aisles.
- Using air handlers to better con¬trol air flow within the data centre and enable more efficient cooling.
- Deploying smart cooling energy management systems to reduce energy consumption by as much as 40 percent through the use of heat sensors.
- Increasing cooling temperature targets to slightly above the data centre baseline temperature, with every degree of upward change resulting in an estimated four percent reduction in energy consumption by cooling units.
- Installing renewable cooling sources such as outside air during the winter to minimise usage of internal cooling systems.
- Thin clients:
A thin client is a computer that pri¬marily depends on a server to fulfill traditional computing functions. This contrasts with the original “fat” client (or PC), a computer designed to take on these functions by itself. Thin client technology pro¬vides a greener alternative to tradi¬tional PCs, with a significantly reduced ecological footprint. With an average thin client consuming between six watts and 40 watts of power, compared to the 150 watts to 350 watts consumed by a PC, the energy conservation argument is compelling.
- Power management software:
The vast majority of computers run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with 94 percent never going to sleep. It is estimated that the annual PC energy consumption in the US could be cut by about 14 billion kilowatt-hours simply by enabling power-man¬agement features and powering down PCs at night and on weekends. “Power management software monitors PC users’ activity and reduces energy consumption by switching to low-power mode when activity is low and by shutting down PCs when they are left idle,” noted Shehadi.
- Going green through IT:
The value inher¬ent in green IT extends far beyond the direct implications of IT’s use. A whole host of activities not related to IT can benefit when green IT applica¬tions are put into play in areas such as buildings, logistics, energy, motors, teleconferencing, and e-services. These solutions can provide a number of options that reduce the envi¬ronmental impact of user activities and also increase overall productivity.
- Buildings:
Leveraging IT solutions to automate internal building operations results in more effective management of energy needs. Examples of “smart” building features include:
- Motion Detection and Control: Detects personnel presence in rooms and switches lights on or off.
- HVAC Management and Control: Monitors temperature in building rooms and adjusts climate control.
- Light Detection and Control: Measures lighting intensity in rooms and switches lights on or off.
- Control Panel: Receives user input for building automation settings, such as non-working hours and air-conditioning target temperature.
- Logistics:
IT systems can help reduce inefficien¬cies tied to travel, decreasing travel times and thereby lowering vehicle emissions. Such systems also indirectly increase the productivity, efficiency, and effec¬tiveness of the transportation sector.
- Examples of smart logistics technologies are:
- Fleet Management Systems: Global positioning system or other software can gather required data, manage the fleet, and perform tasks such as instantaneous vehicle track¬ing, driver and vehicle profiling, trip profiling, and monitoring of vehicle efficiency.
- Traffic Management Systems: Helps government transporta¬tion officials manage recurring traffic congestion and identify and respond to traffic incidents by employing IT sources such as cameras, traffic signals, and speed radar services. Such systems con¬tribute to optimising and reduc¬ing traffic.
- Energy:
“IT can play a significant role in revamping traditional energy distribu¬tion networks, which often consist of inefficient grids,” said Karam. Building IT capabilities into these networks to create “smart grids” could curb global power sector emissions by more than 14 percent. Smart grids consist of software and hardware tools that allow for efficient routing of electricity, data capture across the power generation and transmission networks, and two-way real-time information exchange with customers. This results in reduced need for excess capacity across the grid, reduced inefficiencies, and effec¬tive energy demand management.
- Going green using smart grids includes:
- Smart Metering: Helps consumers track how much electricity is being used, when, and at what price.
- Smart Billing: Helps providers set rates for consumption according to current energy usage across the grid.
- Resource Pooling: Allows renew¬able and distributed energy distributors—including individual households—to be integrated in the grid and be compensated for doing so.
- Motors:
Industrial activity uses nearly half of all global electri¬cal power generated, with industrial motors contributing to 65 percent of that figure. Moreover, motors are inefficient as they run at full capac¬ity regardless of required output. Therefore, there is opportunity for IT systems to reduce resulting emissions by increasing the efficiency of motor systems. Potential emissions savings for motor systems generated by going green through IT could reach 15 percent by 2020.
- Teleconferencing:
Teleconferencing can limit the need to travel by allowing people in disparate physical locations to meet virtually. Companies are increasingly using telecommuting, allowing employees to work part-time or full-time from home, which cuts down on employees’ daily travel and its corresponding environ¬mental impacts.
- E-services:
IT forms the foundation of initiatives such as e-commerce, e-banking, and e-government, which significantly reduce paper consumption and the need for physical branches for organisations to serve customers. Such e-services also help generate new business opportunities, and help raise user satisfaction levels. In most cases, the financial savings alone merit the up-front investments.
- Conclusion:
The IT function in public and private organisations is under renewed pres¬sure to deliver higher returns on IT investments, reduce costs, and help drive higher performance throughout the organisation. “Concurrently, these same organisations are expanding their efforts to operate in more envi¬ronmentally friendly ways and reduce the environmental impact of their day-to-day activities,” Shehadi commented.
Technology is at the heart of green activities and green IT is quickly emerging as a lever for the IT func¬tion to help organisations meet demands for change. Whether by greening IT or going green through IT, organisations are reducing their carbon footprints and are beginning to rise to the fore of environmental stewardship. The green IT agenda is, therefore, fundamental to the road ahead.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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