Sustainability may be on the corporate agenda, but most companies still don’t know what carbon counting is

A couple of reports published this week give contrasting views of the extent to which companies are addressing sustainability and their carbon footprints.

The latest annual ‘Sustainability & Innovation Global Executive Study’ from The Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review is based on survey responses from 3,000 managers from 113 countries. In the responses, 70% of executives said that their companies have made sustainability a permanent fixture on the management agenda.

Sustainability seems to be gaining ground, with two thirds reporting that it’s necessary to being competitive, up from 55% in the previous survey. Nearly a third also said that sustainability contributes to profitability. Nevertheless, the survey showed there is still a long way to go. Sustainability may be on management agendas, but the responses indicate that it’s the eighth item behind various other more important considerations.

In contrast, US ERP software company Epicor Software has announced the results of its global carbon accounting survey, which finds that most companies are still lagging in their comprehension of carbon accounting as a whole. The survey was of nearly 1,000 companies worldwide, but with quite a large proportion (43%) from organisations with $50m revenue or less. There was also a strong emphasis on manufacturing companies (48%).

But the top level finding is that 58% of companies surveyed had not heard of the term ‘carbon accounting’. Less than a quarter could accurately describe what the term means and 80% don’t monitor their company’s carbon footprint. The survey also revealed that although the CEO is the most likely person to be responsible for a company’s green strategy, 50% of companies surveyed don’t have any C-level involvement at all in their carbon accounting initiatives.

 

OK, so these surveys are very different in terms of who and what they cover and the way they are reported (for example, for Epicor 48% is a majority) but I believe there is an interesting point here.

Sustainability is increasingly on the corporate agenda, led by larger companies. It’s nowhere near the top of the agenda and it’s not clear what aspects of sustainability are being discussed - economic sustainability was the most common aspect according to the survey responses. A lot of companies globally have yet to discuss carbon accounting at the highest level.

But it at least means that sustainability is in the early stages of corporate policy and strategy, which will inevitably mean a trickle down impact on the rest of the organisation in the future. And where these larger companies go, so smaller organisations will follow.

As sustainability moves up the corporate agenda, so the impact on ICT operations will change. To date many ICT carbon saving initiatives have been instigated by the IT department as a money-saving exercise and often assessed and approved as part of IT budget considerations, possibly with the involvement of the CFO or equivalent. Most have not been part of a corporate sustainability policy initiative, more likely as part of a company-wide cost cutting exercise.

We will shortly see the next stage of green/sustainable ICT. As companies increasingly incorporate sustainability into their corporate strategies, so IT operations will have to align with that strategy. IT initiatives will cease to be primarily a piece-meal approach and become an integrated aspect of the corporate sustainability objectives, driven by IT governance. There will be no distinction between whether it’s so-called ‘green for IT’ or ‘IT for green’, but all part of a wider corporate strategy.

Smart grid-ready building management tools launched into a growing market

US energy control company Echelon has launched a suite of tools and products for energy management in buildings aimed at integrating a range of devices, applications and building automation standards. The idea is to make buildings more ‘grid aware’ and ultimately work with, and benefit from, emerging smart grids.

The new suite builds on Echelon’s existing open standard, multi-application platform for buildings. It pulls together a building specification guide to help design and build energy efficient buildings, an application that enables an open building automation architecture, a building network operating system to manage energy management systems and a building energy management toolkit to incorporate a range of devices and applications in a customised energy management solution.

Eric Bloom, research analyst at Pike Research, commented that "Commercial buildings consume about 25% of all electricity worldwide today, so boosting efficiency in the commercial sector is crucial to reducing operating expenses and carbon emissions. To meet these challenges, new energy management technologies are starting to transform the way in which businesses, government agencies, and utilities manage and reduce energy consumption in buildings.”

In fact Pike Research has just released a report on the building energy management systems market. It points out that in the current economic climate governments, building owners and companies are looking for ways to become more efficient and building energy management systems (BEMS) are a key element.These systems include the software, hardware and services for the monitoring, management and control of energy, particularly for reducing energy consumption and costs.

According to Pike’s report ‘Building Energy Management Systems’, worldwide revenue from building energy management systems will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 14% through the rest of this decade, reaching just under $6bn a year by 2020.

 

Echelon’s new product suite highlights the nature of this market at the moment, with disparate solutions addressing different aspects of building energy efficiency (at least that’s my perception – I haven’t read the Pike research). It’s this issue that the new offering from Echelon is addressing – it also represents an opportunity for an ‘open’ solution to pull all these pieces together.

The fragmented nature of the market may hold it back somewhat, although continued pressure on companies and building managers to save money will certainly keep the focus on ways to increase efficiency. Integrated solutions are the way forward, but it may not be until the benefits of full smart grid integration are available, i.e. not until smart grids have actually been implemented (which is still a long way off for a lot of counties, including the UK), that the full benefits will be seen.  

PrimeEnergyIT – an EU energy efficient IT project

I’ve just come across PrimeEnergyIT, an EU-funded project aimed at supporting the market development of energy efficient IT equipment, including server, data storage, network and facility equipment, as well as new power management technologies. The project has been running since 2010 and due to end this year, so I hope it’s reached its target audience (but just not me).

Anyway, PrimeEnergyIT has developed tools and services for IT people, including:

• hardware and service based energy efficiency criteria and metrics

• guidelines on energy efficient equipment and best practise

• education and training of IT and infrastructure managers and experts

• guidelines and criteria for procurement and management

The project is run by an international consortium of national agencies and research institutes in collaboration with a number of industrial partners. One outcome of the project is a 52-page overview of current technologies supporting energy efficient IT. The report, called ‘Energy efficient IT and infrastructure for data centres and server rooms’, covers all essential IT technologies in the data centre and covers a number of topics, including system design, power management for both hardware and the data centre as a whole, and also consolidation and virtualisation approaches.

It’s a useful report, with recommendations for best practice and resources for further reading. As it says itself “The brochure provides a source of basic information for IT and infrastructure managers to support energy- and cost-efficiency”.

But its not just this report. In the ‘Education materials’ area of the site there are further documents going into more background and detail of specific aspects of green IT, including servers, storage, networks, cooling and free cooling. It’s a useful resource, and all free to download.

Moving beyond power to efficiency

A guest post from Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E.

Power management is en vogue and everyone’s talking about it, particularly as energy costs are rising in tandem with increases in consumption. There is also a general acceptance about environmental change and the need that we have to reduce our impact on the environment. Many IT folks are well aware of the importance of power management and the part it plays in reducing energy consumption and cutting costs (although how much they do about it is another matter).

The problem with power is that it isn’t a discrete component of IT. The best way to measure its impact is to look at overall efficiency. It is important to measure whether IT is doing useful work or not. If it is not, you can not only save power but see a whole host of other benefits, including reducing hardware costs (by decommissioning servers); software (by finding and eliminating applications that are not used); as well as associated maintenance. Another factor to consider is the cost of the time that people spend on managing IT. These extra costs can amount to 10x the value of power itself. So if you save £10 on power you could save £100+ in terms of total IT running costs.

So while we started the debate with power, an area that 1E pioneered 13 years ago, what we have since found is that the debate has slowly but surely shifted to one around efficiency. Improving IT Efficiency tops the list for enterprises as they go into 2012, according to independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc.: “While 2011 started with a more robust IT spending environment, many organisations began to pull back midyear, and 2012 plans are expected to be more conservative given the high degree of uncertainty. [...] Efficiency and consolidation are top IT priorities.⁽¹⁾

As an example, one in six servers – 15% in any single data centre at any one time – are not doing anything useful. It’s not about utilisation levels but about the business value that the server delivers; whether your servers are doing anything useful at all. If there’s no useful activity, then your investment is giving you absolutely no return.

Other thought-provoking statistics include:

• A typical UK company with 1,000 PCs wastes £16,800 a year through not shutting down PCs.⁽²⁾

• 22% of purchased software globally is never deployed.⁽³⁾

• Between £650 and £1300 ($1000 and $2000) is spent on Windows 7 migrations per user – this could be saved if automated

• 12% of IT help desk tickets are requests for new software. User self-service could save organisations in the UK and US over £5.6bn ($8.6bn) a year in IT help desk costs.⁽⁴⁾

All of these costs and waste are avoidable. In the quickly-evolving world of IT, efficiency is the next evolutionary step.

 

(1) Forrester Research, 2012 IT Budget Planning Guide for CIOs (October 27, 2011) (2) 1E/Alliance to Save Energy, PC Energy Report (3) 1E, Software Efficiency Report (4) 1E, Help Desk Efficiency Report

Uninterruptible Power Supplies are a key element in green IT efforts

According to a report from Pike Research, as green IT becomes an important goal, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems will increasingly need to work with the existing IT infrastructures to support overall green IT objectives.

The report says that future UPS systems will combine several key features. The essential part is the built-in energy storage source, primarily batteries, flywheels or compressed air. They will also need the circuitry to supply sufficient clean power for anything from a few seconds to several hours. In addition, most leading UPS systems also have some form of surge protection or power filtering circuitry. With these features, Pike says that a UPS system can play a larger role in the overall smart energy infrastructure, part of a more holistic energy management strategy.

“UPS systems are already an important energy storage feature in cost-efficient and smart buildings,” said vice president of research Bob Gohn.  “The emergence of hybrid topologies that automatically switch between different power modes can reduce energy costs over time without compromising power quality.”

 

There has been increasing focus on greener UPS systems in data centres in recent years, although in my experience it’s been more about just making the UPS itself greener, for instance by using a flywheel rather than batteries.

Up-time is still the single most important factor in running a data centre, though, well above any other consideration, so UPS systems are critical. Integrating the UPS with greener infrastructure management seems an obvious move, particularly as data centre power management becomes much more comprehensive. But I suspect a lot of data centre managers will be very cautious about making the UPS too complex. 

Schneider acquires Veridity and merges their data centre power management solutions

In case you missed it, just before Christmas energy management company Schneider Electric announced that it had acquired Viridity’s EnergyCenter Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Software. Viridity’s methodology for measuring server power consumption will be merged with Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare for Data Centre Operations DCIM suite to provide data centre asset tracking, capacity planning and energy visualisation.

Viridity’s EnergyCenter software provides an analysis of energy use and trends for servers and other devices. The software looks up reference tables for the energy consumption of the equipment it identifies and combines it with utilisation data (based on processor activity) to analyse overall equipment energy used. (Viridity also had a free online utility called EnergyCheck that provided a data centre energy health check and suggested actions to cut power consumption. It doesn’t seem to be available via Schneider’s web site).

Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare is a combination of its DCIM and Data Centre Facility Management (DCFM) software tools. The software gives an integrated view of the physical systems in the data centre. It also gives executives and managers visibility and control over their data centre’s daily operations.

 

Viridity hasn’t been around long – founded in 2007, it launched its first product in 2010. But it clearly had potential. The company raised $15m in financing from investors (North Bridge Venture Partners and Battery Ventures) and last year won the Uptime Institute’s 2011 Green Enterprise IT Awards (GEIT) in the ‘Outstanding IT Product In a User Deployment’ category. I would guess that the investors got a handsome return.

What’s different about Viridity’s solution is that it doesn’t need any additional hardware or software installed – it just identifies the IT equipment and application and checks its database for energy use. It means it’s fast to implement and relatively inexpensive. That complements Schneider Electric’s more hardware-based approach, focused on the equipment used and management of the facility power. The Viridity acquisition is an attractive option to expand Schneider’s offerings and customer base.

As I’ve said before, the data centre is becoming a battlefield for a range of solutions to monitor and manage power use. I would expect to see an increasing number of acquisitions (and partnerships) in this area in the next year or two.

Mountains, fjords and data centres

There’s a lot of talk about locating data centres in places where they can make best use of the surrounding environment. Few can be as well-placed as the Green Mountain data centre located in a former NATO ammunition depot inside a mountain beside a fjord in Norway.

In summary, the facility features:

• Nine halls inside the mountain with 15,692 m2 floor space in total, plus admin building and warehouse.

• Access to cold water for cooling - 8°C all year.

• Expected PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) of less than 1.2 (The Green Grid Platinum level).

• Use of renewable energy (60% of Norway’s power is renewable, mostly hydropower).

• Multiple high capacity communications lines to Oslo, directly to the UK and to continental Europe.

• Direct power lines from several power stations.

• As secure as you would expect, given its previous use.

• Quay with "roll on-roll off" option.

• 30-minute drive from Stavanger, with direct flights from Stavanger across Europe.

The data centre is a partnership between investment company Smedvig Eiendom, utilities company Lyse Energi and ErgoGroup, the largest provider of ITC services in Norway.

The developers are in the late stages of negotiations with Norwegian clients, but believe the facility will also be attractive to multi-nationals based in the US and Europe. The build-out of the co-location halls is expected to start this month and Green Mountain expects the first clients to be installed in late 2012.

 

It seems like a pretty ideal location. The use of the cold water is a significant factor in making it very efficient in its use of power, the majority of which will be from renewable sources anyway. And in that location its pretty well hidden and protected from most other outside factors.

If only all data centres could be so ideally placed. I wonder how many redundant NATO ammunition depots there are in Europe?