ICT is well represented among the most sustainable corporations in the world

In a ranking of the most sustainable corporations in the world the ICT sector is well represented, with at least 13 companies in the top 100 list. (Possibly more, depending who you include). Heading the ICT companies is Nordic telecoms company TeliaSonera, in 13th place, followed by Intel (18), but with IBM in a relatively lowly 69th place.

Corporate Knights, a Toronto-based media, research and financial products company, formed the Global Responsible Investment Network to create the 2012 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World (the Global 100) list. According to the company, The Global 100 is the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence.

The rankings are determined through a two-stage research process. Firstly the ‘Global 400 Sustainability leaders’ were selected based on their ratings from The Global Sustainability Research Alliance (GSRA) and on their performance on a financial stress test administered by Global Currents. Then the Global 400 companies were ranked against their industry peers on 11 KPIs used in the Corporate Knights research model.

Looking through the rankings, ICT companies in the top 50 (with ranking) include:

• TeliaSonera (13)
• Intel (18)
• Swisscom (20)
• Schneider Electric (26)
• SAP(27)
• Dassault Systemes (32)
• BT Group (33)
• Siemens (41)
• Logica (46)

Also included in the top 100 are Vodafone (65), IBM, in (69), Ricoh (72) and Samsung (73). (Of course it’s not always clear cut as to who is an ICT company and who isn’t – Schneider Electric might not be considered mainstream ICT, but is a major supplier of power and cooling products and services for data centres).

 

It’s noticeable how relatively poorly US companies do in this rankings, given the country’s leading position in the global ICT industry. Europe is much more strongly represented, and its good to see three UK companies in the top 100 (there aren’t very many UK ICT companies big enough to get into these rankings!).

Corporate Knights says that its aim is ‘to mainstream sustainability in the business community’. It wants to create a virtuous cycle where the most sustainable companies attract the most capital and earn the best returns. It also points out that these companies are models for the art of the possible, ‘living proof of how billion dollar entities can squeeze more wealth from less material resources while honouring the social contract.’

Ebay launches its new green web site

The eBay Green Team, a global team of 2,500+ eBay employees and more than 300,000 members of the eBay community, last week launched a new destination for all things green at eBay. The aim is to help users buy, sell and think green every day.

Green.eBay.com brings together the content-focused eBay Green Team site and the shopping-focused green.eBay.com. It combines community-generated content, green products and projects and news about programmes and partnerships, all designed for a greener lifestyle.

The site includes:

• New product categories to suit the more environmentally aware.

• Member recommendations for greener products

• Guest bloggers with a green voice

• The Green Team Talks blog on eBay green initiatives

• The new Green at eBay section, which will pull together all of the company’s green programmes, policies, credentials and progress all in one place.

 

eBay is hoping that the new site will “become a place that you regularly visit for lifestyle inspiration, and where you can share your favourite green ideas, projects and products with others like you.”

It’s a lofty ambition and I’m not sure it’s the first place a dedicated environmentalist would visit for information and advice. But eBay does have a very valuable role to play in extending the lifecycle of all the stuff we consume. It would be interesting to assess just how much dumping on landfill has been avoided by using eBay to extend the life of products and make money at the same time. So it’s a good idea for eBay to expand on that green benefit on the web site.

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?

Interxion provides 50% renewable energy to its data centre customers

Netherlands-based co-location company Interxion has announced that more than half of the power provided for its data centre customers now comes from renewable energy sources. Solar, wind, geothermic, tidal or hydro energy is available in its data centres in 11 countries across Europe and 100% green power is used in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

The provision of power from renewable sources to drive down carbon emissions is one of a range of sustainable initiatives from Interxion. The company has also driven its PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) down year-on-year through a mix of design, procurement and operational measures. The company also uses alternative cooling sources, such as sea-water cooling, wherever practical and is in the process of implementing closed-loop energy recycling systems, where the heat generated in the data centre is recycled for use elsewhere.

 

All good stuff, but not entirely altruistic. Peter Cladingbowl, Interxion SVP Engineering & Operations Support, is quoted as saying “Over half of the power we provide comes from sustainable sources in order to offer a choice of renewable energy to our customers, many of whom are among the global leaders in addressing corporate social responsibility issues and the environmental impact of their ICT infrastructure.”

If you want to supply the big companies then you can’t ignore their sustainable IT/supply chain programmes, which will inevitable include reducing carbon emissions. It’s good to see that Interxion is also addressing data centre efficiency and heat output issues as well, though – just using renewable power is not the complete solution.

Carbon Trust online tool encourages employees to save power

The Carbon Trust, the UK government-supported low-carbon agency, has launched an online tool called ‘Carbon Trust Empower'. The tool enables employees to make practical commitments to cutting energy and waste through an interactive, animated tour of a typical workplace. It’s seen as a springboard for larger organisations to introduce their own internal behavioural change programmes.

Using Empower, employees can explore energy saving opportunities throughout their office. It starts with how they arrive for work, with options to travel by public transport, before moving on to their desk, where, for example, they can commit to switch off their PC when not in use and teleconference rather than travel. The tool also provides facts and figures so that employees’ energy savings can be assessed.

The Carbon Trust believes that by engaging employees in cutting energy use, paper waste and travel, Empower has the potential to save a typical small business over 15% of their energy bill or more than £6,000 a year – equivalent to powering 3.5km of street lights for a year (perhaps not the best example, given that street lights are being switched off all over the country to save power – and money). Larger businesses that base their approach on this tool could save £150,000 and over 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

Overall, the Carbon Trust estimates that employees could save UK businesses and public bodies £500m and two million tonnes of CO₂ – equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of all the households in Birmingham. Whitbread and Oxford City Council have already signed their staff up.

 

Well, encouraging employees to be greener firstly requires a degree of education, so that everyone understands the reasons and gets behind the initiatives. It also needs some internal encouragement, to get everyone involved. Empower seems to combine the two. It is only the very first, introductory, step, though, and needs to be quickly followed up. Internal competition to save power seems to be emerging as a great way to incentivise people, for example.

But there are some areas where more in-depth education and involvement is required because they are pivotal to energy use and helping achieve a corporate strategy and targets. IT itself is one of those. A lot more can be achieved by having an IT department that fully sees and understands the benefits of low-carbon IT and brings that view to bear on all decisions. It’s better to have the IT department initiate actions rather than a CSR department making, possibly misguided, demands.

Verdiem partners with Information Builders

PC power management company Verdiem has announced a partnership with business intelligence (BI) software company Information Builders. Verdiem will integrate Information Builders’ technology into its solution to make it easier for users to develop power management policies and manage energy consumption.

Under the agreement, Verdiem is integrating Information Builders’ WebFOCUS solution into its Surveyor 6 platform to enable centralised power management to distributed IT devices.  Surveyor 6 measures key industry metrics like energy consumption, energy cost savings and carbon dioxide emission reductions. The partnership means that the data is more accessible to users, who can also drill down for deeper analysis. WebFOCUS' browser-based platform also enables self-service access to these reports and the data can also be shared with broader audiences via a web portal.

In larger enterprises it can be difficult to handle the scale of data collected by Surveyor 6, hence the use of WebFOCUS. It means the data can be more easily applied to optimise energy consumption and make more informed decisions about reducing IT operating costs and power management policies. As the variety of IT devices Surveyor supports expands, WebFOCUS can scale up.

Verdiem claims that 30%-50% energy and cost savings can be achieved using Surveyor 6, with return on investment in five to eight months.

 

The power management solutions market seems to be developing a fundamental rift. On one side are companies like Verdiem that offer increasingly deep functionality and the means to tailor (and integrate) the software as part of a corporate power reduction monitoring and reduction strategy. On the other side are those providing simpler and easier to install solutions. This camp includes desktop management companies offering power management functionality, but also suppliers such as Joulex, with products increasingly integrated across the IT infrastructure.

It’s horses for courses – both sectors have significant market potential. But at the top end, where the likes of Verdiem and 1E sit, there is likely to be a lot more of this type of partnering (or even acquisitions) as specialist IT power management companies come together to provide broader and more comprehensive solutions to the corporate market.

EU reaches agreement on WEEE collection rate changes

Just before Christmas the European Parliament and Council finally thrashed out an agreement on updating the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) legislation. Under the agreement the current national WEEE collection rates of 4Kg per person will remain for four years (after the legislation is passed). For the following three years collection rates will be assessed at 45% of the weight of equipment entering the market. After that, around 2020, member states can chose a collection target of either 65% of the weight of equipment entering the market or 85% of the weight of waste equipment.

It’s been a tortuous process getting to this point. As I reported last March, the Parliament wanted national collection targets to be 85% of e-waste produced by 2016. This has been pushed back to 2020 and countries can alternatively use the European Council’s preferred 2020 target of 65% of the weight of equipment placed on the market. So the Council has effectively managed to water down the EU Parliament’s proposal.

There are a number of other issues included in the legislation – various amendments will be debated when the compromise legislation goes before the EU Parliament again. But it was agreed that there will be obligations on retailers to take-back small equipment without a further obligation to buy. The scope of equipment covered will also be more broadly defined.

 

This was always going to be a good news/bad news sort of legislation. The targets have been lowered but on the other hand the scope is expanded and large retailers have been drawn in. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter what the targets are if the law is being flouted and equipment taken overseas for ‘recycling’ that is dangerous to health and the environment. It remains to be seen if, and what, greater policing of the policies will be introduced, but the two should go much more hand-in-hand.

AlertMe launches into the US with a big opportunity

UK Home Energy Management (HEM) company AlertMe has announced a commercial partnership with US home improvement retailer Lowe’s. Based on AlertMe’s Smart Home platform and home hub, the partnership will deliver a cloud based home management system in North America. The service, called Iris, will enables users to monitor and control their home using their smartphone or computer.

Iris will be introduced in the second quarter of 2012 in stores and online, starting with energy and home management applications such as thermostats, smart plugs, lighting, door locks, motion sensors,etc. Lowe’s plans to extend Iris into areas such as smart appliances, vehicles, garden, and remote second-property management.

 

This looks like a great win for AlertMe, given that Lowe’s is apparently the second largest home improvement company in the world with 1,750 stores, nearly $50bn in annual revenues and 15 million weekly shoppers.

Just last May the company announced a new Chairman, Ron Mackintosh, ex head of CSC in Europe and said it was gearing up for expansion in the UK and the Americas. It certainly seems to have made good progress, perhaps helped by the withdrawal of Microsoft’s Hohm  and Google’s PowerMeter from the market.

Lighting systems can be the key to data centre energy efficiency

There are many ways that you can address energy efficiency in data centres, but an article in The Data Center Journal suggests that the best place to start is the lights.

One of the easy quick wins for saving money in a data centre is to simply turn the lights off. In the past data centres have been permanently lit, despite the fact that no one enters a room from one day to the next. The savings may not be huge, 3-5% of the power requirement when the impact on cooling requirements is taken into account, but why waste it?

But the article, from Sam Klepper, EVP of Building Solutions and CMO for Redwood Systems, goes further, placing lighting systems at the heart of data centre energy monitoring.

We’re not talking about standard, switched light bulbs, but an intelligent lighting system based on networked LEDs. These devices last longer, generate less heat and are connected via a direct current(DC)-powered network. One of the main advantages is that the network can also incorporate multiple sensors that can accommodate countless specialised features. Once the lighting platform is in place it supports a range of building intelligence applications.

The article says that switching to an energy-efficient lighting network that integrates building-performance systems can result in improving PUE by up to 25%.

 

Well, the savings aren’t from the lighting system itself, but from the ability to monitor the environment and identify where actions should be taken. This is one of a number of approaches to monitoring the data centre, some addressing the facility as a whole and some more directly monitoring (and managing) IT and other equipment.

Much depends on other energy-reduction initiatives to address the PUE. For example, running systems hotter, which is something Intel has been talking about a lot recently. Facebook refitted its Santa Clara data centre to operate at 27°C, which saved $229,000 in annual energy costs. But you really need to be sure that complete systems will be reliable at higher temperatures, which needs more than just Intel’s say-so.

The other main alternative, and one that is gaining considerable momentum, is to use the external environment to cool the data centre. Much easier to do if you’re building a new facility (more on that in a post in a day or two), less so for refits. And it depends on location. It can dramatically reduce PUE, and hence energy costs, in one fell swoop. It’s also much more under the control of the data centre manager and still leaves lots of room to make the IT infrastructure itself more efficient.

Electronic reuse and recycling is reducing e-waste dumping, but too slowly

According to a study from Pike Research, the challenge created by ever-increasing amounts of e-waste is being mitigated by strong growth in the reuse and recycling of electronic equipment. The volume and weight of equipment that has reached the end of its life will more than double in the next 15 years, but electronics recycling and reuse will increase seven-fold in the same period. In fact by the early 2020s the amount that will be recycled and reused will be more than the annual weight of electronic devices that become e-waste, the report predicts.

The total volume and weight of end-of-life electronics is expected to rise from 6.0 million tons in 2010 to 14.9 million tons by 2025. As a result, industry players, governments and advocacy groups will be looking for new ways to expand electronics recycling and reuse to prevent the environmental hazard of burying or burning. Fortunately, electronics recycling and reuse will rise from 1.1 million tons a year in 2010 to 7.9 million tons annually by 2025. But it’s still not fast enough to prevent the total volume of e-waste going to landfills from increasing throughout the period.

Pike’s analyst, Bob Boggio, said that trans-boundary shipments of e-waste from developed countries to developing countries continues and the informal recovery of components and materials in developing countries remains a concern for human health and the environment. The gap between dumping and reuse/recycling may be narrowed if national and regional governments modify their legislation to close loopholes.

 

The research agrees with the findings of SBI Energy, which I reported on just before Christmas. SBI’s focus was on the global market for services around the recycling and re-use of e-waste, worth close to $6.8bn in 2010, up 10% from $6.2bn the year before.

But there must be a large number of unknowns in all the estimates, not least relating to the expected lifecycle of equipment. The increasing speed with which manufacturers introduce new devices to encourage sales doesn’t look likely to slow down.

That’s not the only problem. GreenIT.fr has pointed out that two major disk drive manufacturers - Western Digital and Seagate – have just shorten the guarantee of their hard drives, Seagate by as much as 50% in some cases (more for bare drives). It leaves IT managers with the choice of the cost of the optional extended warranty or to renew their equipment more frequently. That’s a step backwards.

(Finally, for future studies in this area there’s a need to agree on terminology. For Pike, equipment that’s no longer required for the purpose it was originally acquired (end-of-life) is known as e-scrap. E-scrap that’s not recycled, reused, or stored becomes e-waste. The distinction is a necessary one, but the labels are probably better used the other way round).

Facebook hires Google’s green energy tsar

Facebook’s new commitment to greener operations, has been reinforced by the news that the company has hired Bill Weihl, the man behind Google’s green energy strategy. According to TechWorld, Weihl, who left Google in November, will join Facebook sometime in January.

It was only in December that Facebook succumbed to pressure from Greenpeace by announcing a goal of powering all its operations with clean and renewable energy. The company announced that it would work with Greenpeace on promoting renewable energy, encouraging major utilities to develop renewable energy generation and enabling Facebook users to save energy.

In an interview with Fresh Dialogues, Weihl confirmed that in the Facebook role “the focus will be on sustainability, clean energy, energy efficiency, etc.”

 

Given Google’s extensive involvement in renewable energy projects (just search the blog to know more) Weihl certainly looks like the right man to help Facebook.

Google continues to pour money into renewable energy, with the announcement in December of a new $94m investment in a portfolio of four solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energy near Sacramento, California. It brings total investment in clean energy to more than $915m. In addition the company has already committed to providing funding to help more than 10,000 homeowners install solar PV panels on their rooftops.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Facebook is in a mood to match Google in its clean energy ambitions. It should, but I don’t think it will.