1&1 Plans Green Data Centre

UK-based 1&1 Internet, which claims to be the world's largest web hosting company, has announced plans to build one of Europe's largest data centres on a former (but never used) nuclear fuel facility in Hanau, Germany.

The data centre, which should be operational by the end of 2009, will house up to 100,000 servers in 10,000 square metres of floor space and 'like all 1&1 data centres' will only use electricity from renewable sources.

Whatever you think of nuclear power, that has to be a good result!

Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics

Greenpeace has released the latest of it's quarterly assessments of how Green electronics companies are. The chart shows the latest scale and I've also attached the equivalent from three months ago for comparison.



The biggest moves up the ranking are Motorola, (from 15th to joint 7th), Toshiba (from 7th to 3rd) and Sharp, (from 16th to 10th). The companies going in the other direction are the PC brands Acer, Dell, HP and Apple, although Apple's score is actually higher than before because of better reporting on the carbon footprint of its products.

Greenpeace points out that Motorola, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Lenovo, Samsung, Nintendo and LG Electronics are notably lagging behind on energy and climate change, with no plans to cut absolute emissions from their own operations and no support for the targets and time lines needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Only three - Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC), Philips and Sharp - support the level of cuts in greenhouse gases that science requires and only Philips and HP get top marks for committing to making absolute reductions in their own greenhouse gas emissions from product manufacturing and supply chain.

The full report is here.

CSR Reports - never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width

PR company Spada has released a report which confirms my suspicions about some CSR reports. I've pointed out in previous blogs how long CSR reports have become - only last week IBM released it's offering which came in at just under 100 pages online. The danger is that someone would actually print it. Anyway, this analysis from Spada focuses on the UK FTSE 100 and it seems to me that in general reports are shorter in the UK (and Europe) than in the US.

According to Spada the average length of the FTSE 100 CSR reports was 21 pages, but the longer they are the more chance of winning an award; the reports of winners of the Business in The Community (BITC) Top 100 award average 25 pages, reports of Global 100 award winners are 26 pages and those of the CDP Climate Leaders are an average 30 pages in length.

There was only one company classified in the technology sector in the report and that was software company Sage, who's CSR report was apparently just two pages long. (There were several telecoms companies, including BT and Vodafone, with an average of 21 pages in their reports).


One last point made by Spada; of the 79 organisations from the FTSE 100 which use the term “sustainability” in their corporate responsibility reporting, only three define what they mean by it. Not a good start!

Green Grid Supports EU Data Centre Code of Conduct

The Green Grid, which as I'm sure you know is a consortium of IT companies (including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft) aiming to improve energy efficiency in data centres, has come out in support of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, which I reported on yesterday.

The EU (and everyone else) is using the Green Grid's Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) metric (and its equivalent Power Usage Effectiveness - PUE - metric) to measure efficiency. DCiE/PUE compares IT power consumption with that of the data centre as a whole.

EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres Launched

The European Commission has launched its much awaited guidelines and recommendations for data centre best practice which it believes could lead to a reduction in energy consumption by data centres in Europe of up to 20%, in line with the EU's overall 20/20 (20% CO2e emissions reduction by 2020) target.

The Code of Conduct has been developed over the past two years by the JRC Institute for Energy (IE), in consultation with a range of stakeholders including industry experts, equipment vendors and representatives of both data centre owners and operators. (The JRC is the EU's Joint Research Council, who's stated aim is 'to provide customer-driven scientific and technical support for the conception, development, implementation and monitoring of EU policies').

The EU has set its sights on the 56TWh of electricity it has estimated were consumed by data centres across Europe in 2007 - 'close to the yearly total electricity consumption of the Czech Republic'. It estimates that if no action is taken that figure will almost double by 2020.

The code is intended to 'inform and stimulate data centre operators to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without hampering the critical functions of the facility'. According to the JRC there has already been a response from industry, with some operators already starting to implement many of the best practices (although I can't help wondering that might not just have been part of a general move in the industry to make data centres more efficient to reduce energy bills).

There's a lot in the Code, which you can read here, but the JRC cites three of the main areas as:

- Using energy efficient servers and virtualisation
- Not 'over-cooling' data centres, i.e. providing more cooling than is actually required
- Better management of the data centre environment through design, using natural cooling, etc.

The Code is currently just providing direction to the industry, but there must be a likelihood, if not an inevitability, that as legislation starts to kick in and targets get nearer it may eventually become enshrined in law.

IBM CSR Report

IBM has released its 2007-8 CSR report, which comes in at just under 100 pages online (lets hope it isn't printed).

Just looking at the Climate Protection section, the company exceeded its goal of annual energy savings of 3.5%, coming in at 3.8% for 2007. IBM has made significant energy savings in recent years - between 1990 and 2007 it saved 4.6 billion kWh of electricity and avoided nearly 3.1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions (equal to 45% of the company’s 1990 CO2 emissions) saving $310m in the process.

However, the emissions reductions were a setback for the company's own target. The plan is to reduce CO2 emissions by 12% between 2005 and 2012 through energy conservation, use of renewable energy and/or offsets. In 2007 emissions actually increased by 5% over the previous year, attributed to business growth, and is now 2% up on the 2005 base year, so the target is now that much harder (lets hope the offsets don't become a reality).

It just goes to show how difficult it is to reduce emissions levels with a growing business, but it's only absolute reductions that are going to save the planet.

There's an awful lot more that IBM is doing (and achieving) in CSR - the full report is here.

LB Hillingdon's Virtualisation Savings

Surprisingly few contract details or success stories seem to come across my desk (more please) and I've only just come across this one about the success of the London Borough of Hillingdon's virtualisation programme.

It seems that Hillingdon has embraced VMWare's virtualisation technology as part of an infrastructure upgrade, replacing 20% of its estate (40+ servers). The swap-out was done earlier this year and the London Borough is reporting a 70% reduction in power consumption both directly and through reduced cooling requirements.

World Business Summit on Climate Change, 24-26 May 2009

You may be (or indeed should be) interested to know that six months before the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, the Copenhagen Climate Council is organising the World Business Summit on Climate Change, which will bring together the business community and the world's top scientists, economists, civil society, media leaders, government representatives and other leading thinkers to put forward recommendations for the next international framework on climate change.

The Copenhagen Climate Council is a collaboration between international business and science founded by the Scandinavian think tank, Monday Morning (is that the best time for thinking?). The summit is on May 24-26 in Copenhagen - more details here.

This Climate Council and the summit both sound like good ideas. It does seem that business is driving the climate change issue as much as governments are, particularly in the IT sector. Whilst legislation will have a big impact, arguably it will only really be successful if governments work hand-in-hand with business.

In any case, I also came across a paper presented at the CESifo Summer Institute 2008 in a workshop on 'Europe and Global Environmental Issues'. The paper, which you can read here, highlights the many problems in reaching an agreement at the UN climate conference at the end of 2009. Hopefully the business community can add its weight.

Energy Star Server Spec Coming

While we're on the subject, Energy Star has released the third draft of its specification for servers and expects the final version to be available in February 2009. (Energy Star is a joint programme of the EPA and US Department of Energy which gives efficiency ratings to electrical products. Energy Star ratings are part of the EPEAT criteria - see last blog).

FCS Green IT Label

Fujitsu Siemens Computers (soon to be divorced from Siemens) has launched a Green IT label intended to give customers an immediate indication of how products perform in terms of energy efficiency and environmental impact throughout their life cycle. The company said that it had reviewed existing eco-labeling systems and found they were not stringent enough for its needs.

The labels use a three-level approach, from one star up to three star, the highest rating. The company apparently uses a stringent set of criteria and the three star rating requires products to meet a comprehensive list of criteria relating to materials used, recycling and power consumption. The labels will appear first on FCS' PCs and notebooks, starting with those manufacturer this month, whilst the criteria for servers and storage are still being finalised.

The company is publishing the qualification criteria and inviting industry partners to join the programme.

This looks like a challenge to the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) from the Green Electronics Council in the US. EPEAT has a lot of weight because federal acquisition regulations in the US require federal agencies to purchase at least 95% EPEAT-registered products in relevant categories. The standards are also becoming more widely adopted outside US government purchases and starting to be looked at by public sector buyers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. It would appear that FCS doesn't think the standard is high enough (and/or thinks Europe should have its own). But the company does say that it would be happy to adopt a 'suitable' industry-standard labeling system.

Obama's Green Policy

So now the excitement's over what does an Obama presidency mean for Green policy in the US? Well there's a lot on policy on his web site and much of the emphasis is on US energy security, the main points are:

- Provide short term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
- Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150bn over the next ten years to catalyse private efforts to build a clean energy future.
- Within 10 years, save more oil than is currently imported from the Middle East and Venezuela
combined
- Put one million (American-built) plug-in hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015
- Ensure 10% of electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25% by 2025
- Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050

This was a policy statement during the campaign so clearly it had to appeal to domestic audiences (hence the order in which the points are made), but let's hope that there's not too much emphasis on energy security and protectionism around the source of hybrid cars and more around reducing energy use and using Green sources. The 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 is commendable (and matches the UK national legislation that has already been passed).

Roll on January.

Another Green IT Survey

Extreme Networks and Data Integration have released the results of their first annual Green IT survey in the UK (shouldn't you really wait until the second one before claiming it's annual?). I don't know how many people were asked or who they were, but IT Backbones has published some of the results, which were:

- 43% of businesses cited Green IT as important to their organisations
- 51% of respondents said they were unsure whether their organisations had sustainability goals for Green IT
- 64% of respondents cited Green IT as a requirement when purchasing new IT equipment.
- 49% of organisations cited reduced operational costs as the main driver for greening IT operations.
You would think this was fairly encouraging. The importance of Green could be higher, but the fact that reducing operational costs is a main driver is no surprise.

The real disappointment, though, is that only 20% of respondents said they actively measured IT-related energy use and costs. All this is pretty pointless if your not measuring the IT energy impact. You would think that by now CEOs and Finance Directors would have cottoned on to the need for IT departments to account for their energy. Even if it's just in PR terms, reducing IT energy use and not recording the change is pretty dumb.

Sun's CSR Report

Sun has released its 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, which you can see here.

It's a pretty comprehensive document, but just focusing on the greenhouse gas emissions, the company reported that it has already reached its EPA Climate Leaders goal of a 20% reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions from 2002 levels by 2012. In fact the company had reduced CO2 emissions by 23.4% from 2002 levels by the end of 2007, largely attributed to greater efficiency and building consolidation.

This is a U.S. target only, but almost 77% of the company's total of 286,000 metric tonnes of CO2e emissions in 2007 were in the Americas. The company's global goals are to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2 emissions from global operations by 20% over 2007 levels by 2015.

There is also a plan to reduce year-over-year growth in global business travel emissions (which are Scope 3) to 5% by 2009. That seems quite challenging, given that in the 2007 calendar year CO2 emissions from business travel were up 9.5%, primarily due to an increase in air travel. Apparently emissions from travel in Asia/Pacific region rose by 46% compared with 2006.

The Energy Consumption Rating (ECR) Initiative

Ixia, a provider of performance test systems for IP-based infrastructure, and Juniper Networks, which provides network infrastructure, have joined together to create the ECR framework for measuring the energy efficiency of network and telecoms devices.

To quote from the web site (which is at www.ecrinitiative.org), "The ECR metric creates a common energy denominator between different network and telecom systems operating within a single class. The ECR methodology defines the procedures and conditions for measurements and calculations, and can be readily implemented with industry-standard test equipment".

There is a white paper which describes the initiative here.

UK Legislation and the Public Sector

Well the UK Climate Change Bill has now been passed by both UK Houses of Parliament. There's some further debate around amendments to the Bill, due to be completed on November 17th, but then all that's left is for it to get the Royal Assent (Queen's signature). It's pretty historic in that the UK will be the first country in the world to have ambitious climate change targets built into law.

The targets got tougher as well. It is now an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050, compared with 1990 levels and there is an amendment that demands that aviation and shipping be included by 2012 or the Government has to say why not. (I'll give more details when the legislation is done and dusted)

It's all very well coming out with targets, but what is not so obvious is the actions that go with them. For example, despite the intention to include aviation in the emissions targets in the future, the government is also set to approve a third runway at Heathrow, the world's largest international airport. The same is true of public sector IT, which really should be taking the lead, rather than dragging its feet. In fact I had a conversation along those lines yesterday with one of the leading IT services companies. It's offering to help the government get some measure on its total carbon footprint, the very first place to start.

The government is not slow in helping the rest of the business community, though. In another announcement the British Standards Institute (BSI), The Carbon Trust and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have launched a new standard aimed at providing companies with the tools to assess greenhouse gas emissions across a products life cycle. PAS 2050 (Publicly Available Standard 2050) will assess embedded emissions from sourcing raw materials through to packaging and distribution and consumer use and disposal impacts.