SAS goes Solar

Business intelligence software company SAS has announced that it's working with a local power utility to develop a solar electric power farm on the campus of its North Carolina headquarters. The 1-megawatt photovoltaic solar array will cover five acres and is estimated to generate 1.7m kWh per year, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by over 1,600 tons annually.

We reported on SAS' Sustainability Management offering back in May and this looks like a further tick in the box of making the company a leading 'Green' software supplier.

IBM Green Commercial

This commercial has apparently been around since April, but I hadn't seen it until recently. It pretty much sums up the main Green IT market driver at the moment. If only it were so simple and could always be this easy! Good ad, though.

Fujitsu Services' New UK Data Centre

Fujitsu has been building a new 'North London' data centre in the UK (35 miles from the capital) which was opened this week. I had a chance to look round it last week and it's pretty impressive.

The details are that it's 65,000 sq ft, built on a brown field site (an existing Fujitsu location) and with a lot of effort put into reducing power usage, much of it through more efficient cooling techniques and the use of 'free cooling', including evaporation towers. In fact the PUE (ratio of total facility energy to IT energy) is 1.6, which is pretty good and compares with a PUE of 2.2 for Fujitsu's existing data centres.

The whole facility is built to the Uptime Institute Tier III standard in design and implementation and in fact will today become the first data centre in Europe (and I think outside of the US) to be independently certified to reach Tier III resilience.

There's a lot of fascinating stuff that's gone into it, creating a compromise between energy use and the need for reliability and security, all of which are essential components in the rapidly growing data centre market.

For me the problem with data centres is in how the energy use (and hence CO2 emissions) can be contained in the light of other demands and long-term growth. And whilst there is a commendable reduction in energy use (as with most new data centres), as Green pressure grows clients will be looking for future (and on-going) savings to help address their corporate targets.

Transportation Collaboration

One area where IT is destined to help in reducing carbon emissions is logistics. As emissions increasingly come into the equation transport mileage, storage, refrigeration and other factors will become more sensitive in an increasingly complex logistics operation. The need for the sharing of transport, to cut down fuel use, has been one area of speculation for some time.

Well it's already happening in the UK in a move believed to be a world first. Thirty-seven major food and drinks companies, including the likes of Coca Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Heinz, Nestle, Norther Foods and Sainsbury's, have announced a transport collaboration which is expected to save 48 million miles of travel by the end of this year, the equivalent of removing 800 lorries from the roads. Much of this will be around co-ordination to minimise empty truck movements.

The initiative was led by IGD, the UK retailing and manufacturing body, which will also monitor progress on distance travelled and products moved and publish the findings

Clearly if it is a success, and there's no good reason why it shouldn't be, this will become a widespread trend, but co-ordination between logistics systems will be essential to maximise the gains. That's where IT can help.

Stern Launches Carbon Credit Rating Agency

IDEAcarbon, the research and consultancy company in the carbon and energy markets of which Lord Stern (author of the UK’s Stern report on climate change) is vice-chairman, has launched a carbon credit rating agency.

There is a lot of uncertainty about the value of carbon assets, not just the delivery issues but also the regulatory and measurement risk. The idea is that the new agency will provide evaluation and risk analysis to help buyers decide what they need and how much to pay and help project developers get funding.

It's certainly a market that needs close inspection by those looking to buy carbon credits.

Honeywell Renewable Energy Scorecard

Honeywell has announced a selection tool that helps customers make better decisions when investing in renewable energy. It looks at location variables to come up with the technology that makes most environmental and economic sense.

The tool looks at six renewable technologies, including solar, wind, biomass and geothermal and provides the payback from each based on their potential, financial forecasts, tax implications, rebates and other incentives.

Telcos Demand Greener Equipment

In what I believe may be a foretaste of what's to come in the IT industry, Reuters has reported that at a conference in Las Vagas last week the CTOs from some phone companies said they were looking for better power management from their network equipment. The reasons given were the rising cost of maintaining networks and data centres as traffic increases and the cost of energy climbs. In the Reuters article the At&T CTO is quoted as saying "We've made it clear to them (equipment suppliers) that we need breakthroughs in those areas".

In the growing data centre business (see Monday's blog) energy use is similarly an issue. The IT press in the UK was full of the subject last week, pointing to the rising costs and the fact that power use is consequently becoming more of a measure for data centre pricing. Whilst IT departments are often non-plussed (they haven't been very concerned about power use until recently), pressure will increase significantly as corporations look to cut their carbon emissions and expect suppliers to do the same. Those companies using data centre services will look not only to those that are most energy efficient now, but also expect emissions to reduce over time, in line with their corporate targets. Otherwise they may well move on.

The Role of IT in Managing Emissions

The Climate Group, an independent non-profit organisation, has produced a report (with the help of McKinsey) for the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) looking at the impact of IT on a low carbon economy. It's significant because a lot of ICT companies support GeSI, including BT, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Nortel and Sun. The 86-page report makes very interesting reading and I urge you to take a look. It can be downloaded here.

The main thrust of the detailed report is to point out that emissions from ICT in 2002 accounted for around 2% of global emissions (0.53Gt CO2e) but is set to grow at an average annual rate of 5.7% from 2002 to 2020. However, the opportunities identified in the report could lead to emissions reductions of five times the ICT sector's emissions, or 15% of total BAU (business as usual) emissions by 2020.

The areas the report identifies where ICT can help are:
- Dematerialisation - replacing real-world activity with online equivalents, e.g. videoconferencing rather than travel
- Smart buildings - making the design, construction and operation of buildings more efficient
- Smart power - to enable generators to route power more efficiently
- Smart industry - reducing emissions from motors and industrial processes
- Smart transport - more efficient logistics



The report includes a comment very much along one of the themes of The Green IT Review "While the sector plans to significantly step up the energy efficiency of its products and services, ICT’s largest influence will be by enabling energy efficiencies in other sectors, an opportunity that could deliver carbon savings five times larger than the total emissions from the entire ICT sector in 2020".

Call for Carbon Reporting

One of the themes of the recent report we published is the need for IT companies to make an assessment of their carbon footprint now (they should have done it already) but more importantly to publish the information in a form that makes it comparable with others.

It's good, then, to see that lobby group Aldersgate has come to the same conclusion. The Aldersgate Group is a UK coalition of environmental agencies, NGOs, institutional investors, industry representatives and MPs who "believe that high environmental standards will be a major part of future economic growth and international competitiveness" with which I couldn't agree more.

The group has written to the Prime Minister supporting an amendment to the Climate Change Bill which calls for mandatory carbon reporting, but which the government has been backing away from. The group say in the letter that "A mandatory standard would create a level playing field, allowing consumers and investors to make meaningful comparisons, and also allow the London Stock Market to become a world leader in carbon accounting and reporting". It was also pointed out that the move was supported by 82% of delegates at the last CBI (Confederation of British Industry - the leading employers organisation) conference.

In terms of achieving reductions in emissions this would clearly be a leap forward. One problem is lack of standards around measuring and reporting, although de-facto standards are emerging, such as the GHG Protocol and Carbon Disclosure Project. The problem was highlighted in our report by the fact that of the top 42 software and IT services (SITS) companies we looked at (based on PAC's worldwide rankings plus top players in Europe, UK, France and Germany) who responded to the CDP survey, only 12 provided comparable global data on carbon emissions. Even fewer had emissions reductions targets, which are almost impossible to compare.

If reporting was made mandatory it would quickly take hold and be adopted around the world. It would also need significant IT input to count and monitor emissions. Indeed it would rapidly open up an entire carbon reporting and management application infrastructure.

US Action on Climate Change

Although the Lieberman-Warner bill went nowhere there is still quite a lot of activity around climate change in the US. According to Climate Intel there are various hearings in Congress laying the way for future legislation. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is discussing the problems of energy transmission from remote renewable resources. The House and Senate Appropriations committees are discussing funding levels for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and is seen as a test case for a number of funding requirements. Finally, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing looking into the recent climate change bills and what was good and bad about them.

It's also worth remembering that although federal action is limited there is a lot of carbon counting and reduction targeting going on at state level. At least 20 states now have some targets related to reducing emissions of CO2.

Finally Al Gore yesterday endorsed Barack Obama for President, amidst on-going speculation of an Obama-Gore ticket. It seems unlikely, but Gore having a role in an Obama administration looks quite probable. Either way it would give a serious boost to addressing the climate change issue in the US.

IBM - Energy and Water

IBM made several announcements on Monday.

Firstly, the company has issued a 'call to action' between the IT and utility industries around energy efficiency. The idea is for the utilities to work with corporations on data centre energy use and its reduction. Part of the plan is for IBM to develop a demand management programme to help corporations. It's also working with the utilities industry to reward businesses with Energy Efficiency Certificates, which we mentioned in a previous blog. What's new is that the programme now extends across the entire data centre and facilities, i.e. lighting systems, cooling requirements, etc. New York City power supplier Consolidated Edison is working with IBM on the initiative.

Alongside this announcement was the launch of a new service to help clients identify the most rapid areas of reduction in IT carbon emissions across the infrastructure, including both data centre and distributed infrastructure and also including offices, retail stores, warehouses, etc. Apparently a UK retailer has already saved £120,000 electricity costs and 1,306 metric tonnes of CO2 from the service. The appeal of such a service is obvious, particularly in today's economic climate.

In a separate press release IBM announced the establishment of a Centre of Excellence for Water Management in Ireland. It will focus on monitoring, managing and forecasting environmental challenges such as the movement of pollutants in fresh water, marine and oceanic environments.

All great stuff and reinforces IBM's pre-eminence in services around Green IT, or at least in the PR battle around the market. A look at the blog labels list on the right of the blog shows how much more HP and IBM are active in/talk about this market than other companies. I can't believe other players are not also positioning themselves but they don't seem to be broadcasting it.

Playing the Green IT Card

Those of you who are close followers of the Green IT market might like to know that the latest publication from The Green IT Report 'Playing the Green IT Card' is now available.

The report looks at what IT companies in general, and software and IT services (SITS) suppliers in particular, are doing to address the challenges, particularly around carbon emissions. That means turning their own organisations Green, making products and services more environmentally friendly and, perhaps most importantly, capitalising on the opportunities in the Green IT market. The report makes some assessment of performance and identifies the leading companies in the market.

If you would like more information then give me a call or email (see the contact details opposite). Alternatively, call Shelly Wills at PAC on +44 (0)207 553 3965.

WWF - How IT Can Save a Billion Tonnes of CO2

WWF, the wildlife conservation organisation, has been running a Climate Savers group to mobilise companies to cut carbon dioxide emissions by agreeing more ambitious targets than previously promised - HP and IBM are among the companies signed up. Now, though, the organisation has turned its attention to the role of IT in helping reduce carbon emissions and has come up with 10 ways it believes IT can help reduce one billion tonnes of CO2 emissions. The areas are:

- Smart city planning, to make buildings more energy efficient
- Smart buildings, through the use of sensors and controls
- Smart appliances, i.e. using IT components to make appliances more energy efficient
- Dematerialisation, by which they mean electronic rather than physical delivery
- i-Optimisation, or web 2.0-like knowledge management and collaboration
- Smart industry, i.e. using software and design tools to design low energy processes
- Smart grid through smart metering
- Integrated renewable solutions to allow a wide deployment of renewable energy
- Smart work (see the previous blog)
- Intelligent transport to allow less polluting forms of transport

The full report is here.

How Green is Home Working?

There's been an on-going debate about how Green it is to work from home, i.e. whether energy use/carbon emissions are lower when you swap commuting for using more energy at home. It's particularly relevant to the IT industry because of the nature of the job. It came up in a couple of discussions I had last week with BT and Logica. Both have plans to make a more accurate measure of the differences in energy use and emissions for their work forces to answer the question and assess any savings.

It's interesting, then, to get a press release from Sun with the results of some research it has already carried out. It's Open Work Energy Measurement Project studied more than 100 participants to see how much energy was consumed while working in a Sun office, working at home and during commuting. The company has a vested interest because its Open Work platform provides the tools and practices for flexible working. Apparently 56% of its workforce avail themselves of this flexibility. The survey results included the following:

- Employees saved $1,700 a year in gasoline and other vehicle costs from working half their time at home
- Office equipment energy consumption at Sun's office was twice that in home offices. (That's a bit of a surprise to me - my guess is it's mostly related to switching things off).
- Commuting was more than 98% of an employees carbon footprint for work (1.7% was used to power office equipment)
- Working from home half time saved an average of 2.5 weeks of commute time

Interesting. There seemed to be an assumption in the responses that commuting was by car, rather than public transport. There was also no mention of office heating, which must take very little energy for Sun, given the figures (maybe because Sun's HQ is in Santa Clara), but in the UK, for example, heating emissions could be more significant for home workers.

Clearly figures will vary significantly by country, location and even time of year (method of commuting, climate, etc.) so there's no easy answer. Companies really need to assess the figures by individual office locations.

IBM Big Green Announcements

IBM has today brought together a number of new and previous announcements to expand on the company's Project Big Green initiative - the full press release is here. There are new offerings around IBM's five building blocks of Project Big Green, which are; energy measurement and management; cooling systems; virtualisation; data centre building; and diagnosing, i.e. improving energy use.

One of the main areas of enhancement that was announced is around the data centre itself. IBM has introduced a set of four off-the-shelf data centre offerings which promise to provide significant energy savings at reduced cost. The modular offerings mean that they can be populated as and when required and the range includes a data centre-in-a-box (albeit a big box) and also an option to put a 'high density zone' in an existing data centre.

Other announcements included enhanced Tivoli monitoring for Green energy, which provides additional capabilities in visualising energy use as well as automatic control of server energy and operator alerts.

All good stuff (and enough of the advert) but what I found most intriguing in the presentation I saw around the announcement was the four key messages:

'Energy efficiency is a global issue with significant impact today — and will have an even greater impact in the future'. I think we can all agree on that.

'Data centre design must change – technology and business growth uncertainty and rising costs drive the need for a new approach'. Again, you can't really argue with this, although there does seem to be a view out there that it is a one-off process to solve the problem. In my view improving the energy-efficiency of data centres is like painting the Forth Bridge (as we say in the UK), i.e. as soon as it's done you have to start again. Energy demands will have increased and technology will have moved on.

'Energy efficiency is a key metric to evaluate overall IT operational efficiency'. This I find interesting. I'm not sure whether IBM means it is now or that it should be. It will certainly come in the future but I doubt whether there are many IT departments out there at the moment that would agree. This is where education is needed (and time).

'Immediate financial return can be realized by optimizing around energy efficiency in current data centres, while planning for the future'. Absolutely agree. I have heard tell of paybacks within six months. But as I said above, this is a never-ending process and the pay-back will diminish with each iteration, although carbon taxes may well impact the equation.

Capgemini Smart Metering Contract

Capgemini has extended its contract with Hydro One Networks in Canada to provide smart metering services, including programme management, process design, systems, integration and infrastructure management. In 2006 Hydro One launched a four-year programme to deploy 1.3 million smart meters, connect them to their data centres and develop applications to process time-of-use billing.

This is one area where IT services companies should see significant business in the coming years as utilities providers look to more closely manage and monitor supply and enterprises build energy management into P&Ls.

Capgemini now has a lot of experience in the North American market to call on, but there are also opportunities in Europe. For example, the UK government is expected to reach a decision on the national roll out of smart metering by the end of the year after an industry consultation. Competition for business in integrating the smart meters will come from other energy IT specialists, including Logica, which has Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) as one of its focus areas for growth.

Epson Cuts Emissions

According to ZDNet, Epson plans to reduce its CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050 (compared with current levels). The aim is to reduce emissions 'within the lifecycle of our products'. The company is looking at printer design to reduce part sizes and weights, reusing parts, etc.

The promise seems to have been made by a corporate executive and I can't find hard details (is the 90% products and/or company?), but the fact that it talks about the lifecycle is interesting - I don't recall seeing a promise based on lifecycle emissions before.

The trouble is that this is a promise aimed at 42 years in the future. Who's going to check? Companies need to commit to much shorter term goals to be believable and to enable progress to be tracked. Apart from anything else, the critical point may be much earlier. If we don't hit some hard targets by 2020 we may start to encounter some climate feedback scenarios that could accelerate the problem.

Legislation - US vs Germany

The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (that's the US carbon emissions bill debated in the Senate that I mentioned last week) has inevitably hit the buffers. As might have been expected, it came down to the perceived impact on gasoline prices, which made the headlines. The bill received 48 votes, but needed 60 to overcome a Republican filibuster (in any case, President Bush said he would veto it). It does open the way for legislation next year, though, when a new President is in place. But meanwhile there is no national legislation and the clock is ticking.

That's not to say their is no progress in the US. A couple of weeks ago an area of California introduced the first carbon tax in America (17 years after Sweden became the first country to do so). The Bay Area Air Quality Management District introduced a levy of 4.4 cents per tonne of CO2 emissions, affecting around 2,500 businesses, but with most only liable for a nominal sum. Perhaps more significantly, companies need to measure their emissions and submit their carbon footprints as part of the process

In contrast, the German parliament passed a package of climate laws last Friday aimed mainly at increasing renewable energy use. The bill covered a variety of areas, including more focus on renewable resources, increasing the number of CHP (Combined Heat and Power) generation plants, re-using the hot water generated from power stations, encouraging better insulation in new buildings, more competition between meter reading companies, etc.

The hope is that the actions will double the proportion of renewables energy use in Germany to 30 per cent by 2020 as part of the country's aim of reducing carbon emissions by 40% by 2020 (compared with 1990). The new laws still have to be approved by the upper house.

HP's Sustainability Lab

Those who have been reading the blog will have noticed the recent announcements coming from IBM and HP's labs about technology they have available to help fight global warming. Sustainability is now one of HP's five major research areas and the Sustainability Lab was officially launched yesterday. Apparently the lab will initially focus on three areas; reducing the carbon footprint of data centres by 75%, replacing copper wire in servers with laser light beams, and tools for measuring and managing the energy used to develop products.

There's a long way to go in squeezing out energy use from IT equipment in data centres, but I find the last of these three objectives most interesting. The company plans to develop tools to measure and manage environmental impact metrics, e.g. carbon emissions, energy usage, etc, so that clients can re-engineer their businesses to be more sustainable. It seems to me that these sorts of solutions have the potential to make the most impact and really show how IT can help. I'm sure others will follow.

BT's Climate Commitment

You may have seen news coverage earlier this week about UK telecom/IT services company BT's plans to cut carbon emissions. The headline was that the company plans to reduce emissions worldwide by 80% from 1996 levels by 2020. I was at a BT analyst meeting on Tuesday to talk about what the company is doing. There was an interesting discussion about the plans.

The new target appears to be a re-working of previous objectives, mainly to fit in with the company's expanding overseas operations. In it's last response to the Carbon Disclosure Project BT had included a target of reducing its emissions by 80% by 2016 (which is what we have reported in 'Playing the Green IT Card' - our latest report on the market), but it seems that was for the UK only.

It transpires that the company's emissions from overseas operations have grown from just 1ktonne in 1996/7 to 220ktonnes in 2007/8 (the company's non-UK revenue grew by 28% last year alone). In the light of this growth BT has declared that it is impractical to extend the UK emissions target to cover the whole company. Whilst the UK target will be maintained, a new measure - emissions intensity - and new target will be used for the group as a whole.

Emissions intensity measures the emissions per unit contribution to GDP (or value-added business). Basically it relates emissions to business growth, but it also means that it can generate targets based on expected future CO2/GDP.

I've been rude about emissions intensity targets in the past. It is an oft-quoted method used in the States (the Bush administration has favoured it) but has the inherent problem that targets using the measure do not guarantee any absolute reduction in CO2 emissions. As I understand it, the BT model differs in the fact that they have created targets based on economic estimates of what the market as a whole needs to achieve. The problem is that this is an average, so there will be anomalies along the way.

I only mention it to point out how hard it is to set measures and targets. I'm sure that BT has the best of intentions in doing it this way and it does appear to have some very authoritative support, but I suspect there will be further debate.

Just to give BT its due, the company plans to achieve the target through energy efficiency, on-site renewable generation (aiming for 20% by 2016) and purchasing low-carbon electricity. They did also talk about offsets at the meeting, but that now seems to be a last resort.

New Energy-Efficient Machines from Dell

In the on-going race to have the most energy-efficient PCs, Dell has released the Vostro 410 desktop designed for small businesses. The system apparently saves customers 47% in annual energy costs.

An interesting comment in the press release was that "Direct customer feedback guided Dell to design and deliver the Vostro 410 desktop six months earlier in the product cycle than originally planned". Demand is now clearly driving the market towards energy efficiency.

HP Agreement over Solar Energy

A couple of weeks ago we reported on an IBM breakthrough in photovoltaics technology that could reduce the cost of generating electricity. Well as if not to be left behind, HP has come to an agreement with a company called Xtreme Energetics (XE) for the development of more efficient solar panels. HP will license its transparent transistor technology to XE with a view to designing products with twice the efficiency and half the cost of traditional panels.

US Senate Debates Carbon Trading

The US Senate is due to start debating climate change legislation today. The idea is to cap the carbon emissions from industry resulting in an annual 2% drop in emissions per year between 2012 and 2050 (based on 2005 levels). The Bush administration is strongly opposed, but all the presidential candidates support mandatory cuts in emissions. (In one press report a White House spokesman is reported as saying that ' ...gasoline prices could soar by as much as 53 cents a gallon by 2030', which is just about the price rise we've seen in the UK over the last month).

It's not likely to reach the statute books this year, but is a real possibility for 2009 as and when it's adopted by the Democrats in Congress. If it does become legislation it will give a huge boost to the emissions trading market.