Green ICT Blog
News Corp chooses Hara
London, 23 November 2009
Media conglomerate News Corp. has chosen to deploy the Hara Environmental and Energy Management (Hara EEM) solution to help manage its carbon emissions. The software will provide the central corporate platform for measuring, managing and monitoring the company’s energy and environmental data.
EEM is an enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to help monitor and manage environmental impact in energy, water and waste.
As the press release points out; “Hara EEM provides News Corporation with the on-demand capabilities required to confidently manage environmental information, report against multiple global protocols, find cost savings opportunities, track progress and share best practices across worldwide operations”.
Managing carbon emissions is becoming a major task for a global corporation such as News Corp. With multiple stakeholders to address, spreading legislation and even wider reporting requirements its a task that has the potential to escalate out of control without the right solution in place. It’s not just the counting, it’s also the ability to build carbon costs into corporate plans and test alternative scenarios.
This is a spectacular win for Hara, but there are many players out there now fighting for a foothold in the carbon emissions management software (CEMS) market, so it’s going to get very competitive and the number of suppliers will continue to grow.
If you want to know more about CEMS take a look at a new web site provided by Connection Research. It’s a census of all the products on the market and can be found at www.cemsus.com. There is also a (free) detailed report on the market which I can highly recommend – I wrote quite a lot of it! It’s available via the Cemsus portal or on the Connection Research web site.
Pete Foster © The Green IT Review
Pete Foster has many years experience as an analyst in the IT sector, working both for ICT companies and research agencies. He has worked for IDC, Ovum and more recently set up PAC's UK operation. The Green IT Report, formed in 2007, is a service of his own research organisation, Market Focus. View my complete profile
Australian Government's green ICT plan
Author Pete Foster
London, 16 September 2009
Given my comments yesterday, it’s interesting that the Australian government on Monday published its ‘Whole-of-Government ICT Sustainability Plan’ for discussion.
It’s the result of a 2008 review of the use of ICT, which found a disconnect between the government’s sustainability agenda and managing the energy costs and the carbon footprint of its ICT estate.
The aim of the plan is to:
- Identify environmental standards for government ICT procurement. Various possibilities, including Energy Star and EPEAT, are discussed.
- Identify government ICT energy usage standards and/or usage targets. The government already has several initiatives in this area, including the development of a data centre energy efficiency standard. There are also a number of Green ICT ‘Quick Wins’ (along the lines of the UK governments ICT energy saving programme).
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Identify steps to establish an ICT energy consumption target and reporting arrangements. This includes both overall government and separate agency ICT energy targets and the development of energy management plans.
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Take into account implications of an emissions reduction scheme on the government’s use of ICT and other sustainability initiatives. Among the examples cited are web conferencing and telecasting, Web 2.0 forms of collaboration, video-conferencing and telepresence technologies, flexible working practices such as teleworking, smart metering and decentralised production and management
It’s this last point which particularly differentiates the Australian plan from the UK one. Using ICT to reduce emissions elsewhere seems, at the moment, to be an integral part of the consideration in Australia, as it should be. In the UK, the government’s ‘Greening Government ICT’ report that set the whole thing off also stated that' ‘… ICT can also be used to generate environmental benefits elsewhere in government operations and the UK. It …. should play a major part in reducing carbon emissions from other areas of government activity, for example through enabling tele and video conferencing, remote and home working’.
However, in the UK the government has already committed to ensuring that energy consumption of Government ICT will be carbon neutral by 2012 (although ‘carbon neutral’ has never been fully defined). This seems to be the priority. Not until December 2009 are government departments supposed to demonstrate how ICT is being used to reduce the carbon footprint elsewhere.
In terms of the Australian discussion document (which is here if you want to contribute), my view is:
- Don’t let the ability of ICT to reduce emissions elsewhere become a secondary focus. It’s easy to make quick wins by targeting ICT equipment itself, but short-sighted.
- Don’t re-invent the wheel. For example there are already widely-used standards for equipment procurement, as well as good practice recommendations and efficiency measures for data centres. The more standards are universal (or near universal) the faster they can be adopted.
Pete Foster © The Green IT Review
Pete Foster has many years experience as an analyst in the IT sector, working both for ICT companies and research agencies. He has worked for IDC, Ovum and more recently set up PAC's UK operation. The Green IT Report, formed in 2007, is a service of his own research organisation, Market Focus. View my complete profile
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Author Graeme Philipson
Sydney, 1 September 2009
Amazon Web Services (AWS - part of amazon.com) was set up in 2006 to provide companies with "an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud" (is that where angels sit?). What we're actually talking about here is an on-demand computing resources provide through Amazon.com’s global infrastructure. So what, I hear you ask, has this got to do with green IT? Amazon is not the only company offering online infrastructure resources, but this announcement adds to the flexibility and potential uptake. It's not going to save the world, but its a potential advance in green IT. Graeme Philipson © Connection Research
Anyway, the company revealed an interesting development on Wednesday (via a blog post) with the launch of the Amazon VPC. The service enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to AWS resources via a Virtual Private Network and also extend existing in-house capabilities, such as security services, firewalls and intrusion detection systems, to include the AWS resources.
Amazon does not require any long-term contracts, minimum spend or up-front investments to use the service and customers pay-as-they-go only for the resources they use.
Well if it works (and its still only in beta, with limited availability) it can add significant flexibility to companies in managing infrastructure resources, for example;
Lies, damned lies and Statistics
Author Graeme Philipson
Sydney, 2 June 2009
The political wrangling over Australia’s proposed emissions trading system (ETS) has descended into name-calling and blatant intellectual dishonesty. I’m no great fan of the government’s proposed system (a carbon tax would be much simpler and more transparent), but it’s a reasonable starting point.
But the National’s Senate leader, self-styled maverick Barnaby Joyce, was quoted in The Australian newspaper on Monday 1 June as saying the proposed ETS was "a piece of policy that comes direct from the manic monkey cafe of inner-suburbia nirvana-ville straight to you." Great contribution to the debate, Barnaby.
He also said that ETS stood for "employment termination scheme". This is the same man that defended the mining industry’s employment report, ridiculing the idea that green jobs would be created as “fantastic mystery stuff”.
That mining industry report has gone off the boil a bit now, but it has become notorious for being used by the industry’s supporters as claiming that 23,510 mining jobs would be “shed”. No, guys. That very report, which you comissioned, said that 23.510 fewer people would be employed in mining over coming years than would be the case without an ETS.
The report actually said that there would be many more people employed in mining in coming years (just not as many as would be the case without an ETS). A lower growth rate is a very different thing than a decline, no jobs will go – rather, fewer jobs will be created. Get it right/
The report also totally ignored the prospect of jobs in other sectors making up the shortfall. It’s not a zero sum game. Many other reports, from the Australian Conservation Foundation, the CSIRO and others have predicted significant jobs growth based on new green technologies – hundreds of thousands of them. These are the jobs that Senator Joyce dismisses.
It is a fact of life, amply demonstrated by history, that technological change causes jobs to shift from one sector to another. Agricultural jobs replaced hunting and gathering, manufacturing jobs replaced agricultural jobs, services jobs replaced manufacturing jobs. Now green jobs are replacing brown jobs. There is disruption, but history is all about disruptions.
Whether human-induced climate change is a reality or not is not the issue. I believe it to be the case, and the evidence for it to be overwhelming, but the important thing is that enough people in government also believe that to be the case that our regulatory environment is changing, which means the economics will change, which means the structure of our industries will change. Jobs will be lost here, and will grow there.
Those arguing the opposite are not only on the wrong side of history, they are simply wrong. And when they resort to sarcasm and untruths, they simply indicate the shallowness of their thinking.
Graeme Philipson © Connection Research
Green IT is more than you think ...
Sydney, 5 May 2009
To most people Green IT means the reduction or minimisation of the energy consumption of the IT function in the organisation, the office or the home.
By this definition, Green IT means things like replacing your old CRT monitor with a more energy-efficient LCD model, getting rid of screen savers and turning computers off overnight, replacing PCs with “thin clients”, or outsourcing the data centre. It can mean more efficient recycling of old computers, server virtualisation, or double-sided (“duplex”) printing to save paper.
I keep hearing the statistic that IT is responsible for about two percent of the world’s energy consumption. I can’t find the original source for this, and I feel it’s one of those urban myths that achieve credibility merely by being repeated so often. IT analysts Gartner are often given the credit for it, but even they took the data from elsewhere – it wasn’t primary research.
If the two percent figure is true, that would mean computers would be responsible for as much carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere as the airline industry, a noted and high profile polluter. I suspect the real figure for IT’s share of world energy consumption is much higher.
The Australian Computer Society estimated 18 months ago that computer usage by Australian businesses generated about 1.5% of the nation’s carbon emissions – and that excluded government usage, which would be close to that much again.
Recently The Times of London claimed that “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle". Add up all the Google searches in the world – hundreds of millions every day – and you soon get into some serious numbers.
Google immediately disputed the claim, saying that its data centres are some of the most energy-efficient on earth. That may be so, but they are also some of the largest, and Google often deliberately builds them near large bodies of water so that they can be easily cooled.
The Times partially recanted, saying that it was referring to large and complex searches that may involve many smaller searches, but pointed out that such searches typically involve information held on multiple servers in multiple data centres, with the communications overheads significantly adding to the energy consumption.
Which brings us to an interesting point. People tend to talk of “Green IT”, not “Green ICT”. Throw communications into the equation – and it should be there because ICT is increasingly indistinguishable from IT – and that figure of two percent starts to look far too small.
Add in all the energy required to run all the communications systems in the world. In the UK alone, the largest carrier, BT, by its own admission until recently consumed 0.7% of all that country’s electricity consumption. It has since reduced that, and is now recognised as one of the greenest comms companies on the planet – but that’s one third of two percent just from one company. What do you reckon is Telstra’s carbon footprint?
Why might know a bit more when we start to get some decent figures out of the government’s NGERS scheme, but right now we can only be sure of the fact that ICT is an enormous consumer of energy, and that despite all the efforts being made to reduce IT’s (or ICT’s) energy consumption, the figure will get a lot bigger before it starts to get smaller.
Bob Hayward, former head of research in Asia Pacific for Gartner, and also formerly head of KPMG’s Green IT consultancy practice, calls it a “perfect storm”. On the one hand a number of factors are combining to make IT use more energy-intensive, and on the other hand the imperatives to reduce energy consumption are becoming stronger.
“The new breed of servers and storage devices are heavy, power-hungry and heat-generating”, says Hayward. “But power efficiencies are not keeping pace with performance efficiencies. We are returning to liquid cooling, which consumes a lot more power.
“At the same time electricity costs will probably rise by 50% to 100% by 2012. With reductions in hardware costs, the proportion of the IT budget consumed by energy consumption will soar over the next five years. In white collar firms, half of all emissions will come from the IT function.”
It is hard to argue with Hayward’s assumptions. The problem is, most IT departments have not even begun to measure their power consumption, let alone worked out a strategy for reducing it, or for weathering Hayward’s “perfect storm”.
Clearly, something has to give. When irresistible forces meet immovable objects something dramatic usually occurs. Green IT is not a peripheral issue – it is probably the single most important challenge the IT industry faces in the years ahead.
Add to that the potential IT has for helping the organisation reduce its energy consumption across the board, and the role IT will play in the measurement and monitoring process for systems like NGERS and CPRS, and you can see why the topic has become so hot so quickly.
I predict 2009 will be the year of Green IT.
Graeme Philipson © Connection Research
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