Green IT Unmasked

 

In the past few years, the debate over global warming has shifted dramatically. There is no longer any serious debate about whether it is occurring or whether human actions are largely responsible. The question now is what to do about it. We believe the IT industry has an important, and underappreciated, role to play in global efforts to blunt the worst effects of climate change.

 

 

Much of the discussion about green IT in the past few years has focused on computing itself – the power consumed by processors and chipsets, monitors, fans, routers, switches and the like. Energy consumption and emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, correlate closely, so reducing component power requirements also shrinks their carbon footprint.

 

But let’s be honest: the main motivation has been cost savings. Only recently have most vendors started touting the environmental benefits of computing that is more efficient. This, of course, has given rise to charges that vendors are ‘greenwashing’ – claiming the mantle of environmental stewardship for public-relations reasons, when in fact their motivation is financial.

 

Still, carbon saved is carbon saved, no matter the motivation, and the energy savings from more efficient computing can be significant. It has been estimated that US data centers consume power at about the same rate as the state of Michigan. IBM (News - Alert) estimates that by applying best practices and utilizing the most energy-efficient equipment it can reduce typical enterprise data-centre costs by more than 40 percent; if every US data centre could achieve savings on that scale, the carbon benefit would be the rough equivalent of making the entire Detroit metropolitan area carbon neutral.

 

As long as we’re being honest, though, we also have to acknowledge that making computing itself more efficient isn’t going to make a big dent in the climate change problem. Globally, computing is responsible for only about 2 percent of all power consumption. If we could wave a wand and cut that in half overnight, we would cut CO2 emissions by just 1 percent – so little that normal economic growth would quickly offset it.

 

So this focus on computing itself, by itself, will never achieve what’s required. To make a real difference, we have to look elsewhere.

 

 

This brings us to the second ‘face’ of green IT, the opportunity to substitute low-carbon technologies for traditional, high-carbon functions. Examples include virtual meetings instead of corporate air travel; e-books and e-magazines instead of their paper equivalents; e-commerce instead of traditional shopping; and reducing commute miles by supporting remote access.

 

The recession has prompted many organisations to cut costs by imposing restrictions on employee travel. A handful have done so for environmental reasons. Most, though, are still studying their energy use, establishing baseline figures and setting goals for improvement. Autodesk (News - Alert), for example, has calculated that business travel by its employees was responsible for 36,000 metric tons of CO2 emitted in 2007 – more than half of its total CO2 emissions – and is in the process of calculating company-wide goals for greenhouse gas reductions.

 

Overall, the non-profit Climate Group, whose membership includes a variety of high-tech companies and other business, governmental and non-governmental organisations, has estimated that low-carbon substitutions could reduce CO2 emissions worldwide by nearly 500 megatons of CO2 a year in 2020. Achieving that goal would expand the market for the necessary tools – such as virtual meeting software, collaboration tools in general, VPN software for all those new remote workers, and the like. Still, 500 megatons of CO2 amounts to about 1 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2020 under ‘business as usual’ conditions – again, a relative drop in the bucket, even if all of it could be achieved.

 

 

To make a real impact, the IT industry must attack the largest sources of energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This is the third face of green IT: technologies that help organisations of all types to reduce the energy expended and CO2 emitted in making products; in heating, cooling and lighting offices and other types of buildings; in shipping and storing raw materials and finished products; and in distributing electrical power from where it is generated to where it is consumed.

 

The sheer scale of these energy expenditures and resulting CO2 emissions, and the amounts by which they must be reduced in order to slow and ultimately reverse the process of global warming, creates a significant opportunity for the IT industry. Not for IT alone, of course; many other sectors of the economy must also make substantial contributions. But achieving and maintaining energy and carbon goals will require the ability to closely monitor business operations, to measure relevant parameters, to aggregate all this data and study it for exceptions and trends, to apply controls, and then to prepare reports and demonstrate compliance. In other words, it’s a chance to apply business management solutions – IT infrastructure, networks, various types of sensors, resource management and analytics software, control systems and more – to a large new set of business operations.

 

Supply and distribution management is a particularly interesting, and complex, example. Typically, such solutions have encompassed only a few tiers upstream or downstream from core manufacturing or processing. In most cases, casting a wider net upstream or downstream hasn’t been cost-effective. But if regulators, consumers or both demand lifecycle carbon accounting, supply-chain solutions will have to reach all the way upstream to raw materials sources, as well as downstream through consumption, disposal and recycling, and everything in between.

 

 

It’s true that such solutions aren’t required today, but the trends are inexorable. Several countries have already imposed carbon limits of one sort or another. The International Committee on Climate Change will meet this December in Copenhagen to try to reach agreement on a more stringent successor to the 2002 Kyoto Protocol. The US is actively participating in the current negotiations, and a climate-change bill recently passed the US House and is awaiting consideration in the Senate. Even if these efforts don’t come to fruition right away, clearly the pressure for action is mounting. In fact, it’s becoming more urgent as scientists pile up evidence that trend lines are getting worse – the earth appears to be warming at a rate much faster than even the most pessimistic predictions of a few years ago.

 

Fortunately, an effective response doesn’t require unprecedented levels of altruism but a simple recognition of the business opportunity. Most of today’s most carbon-intensive processes were developed during that long period when energy was cheap and there was no penalty for its profligate use. It has become so entrenched throughout the economy that it’s often overlooked as a source of savings. To illustrate: in many organisations, the power bill still goes to the accounting department to be paid, not to the departments that consume the power and presumably would have the clearest line of sight into potential economies. Furthermore, many energy analyses still underestimate potential savings, skewing return-on-investment calculations and obscuring the contribution that conservation can make to the bottom line even as it reduces environmental impact.

 

Conservation projects often pay for themselves in 12–18 months, faster than many other business investments. Even so, most processes have not been reengineered, and most facilities have not been retrofitted, to make them more energy efficient. That’s a key reason why IBM and its partners in the new Green Sigma Coalition, including SAP (News - Alert), Honeywell, Cisco, Eaton, Johnson Controls, Siemens and others, believe they can build a business on conservation projects in which they achieve energy savings in the order of 80 percent below business as usual.

 

As indicated by the new IBM-led coalition, a growing number of vendors are waking up to the potential in this third face of green IT, but they are just getting started, and the opportunity remains largely unaddressed. As it develops during the next several years, it will offer roles to a variety of players: platform software vendors, application vendors, resellers, systems integrators and consultants, and more. This is the largest opportunity – for organisations in terms of reducing their energy costs and carbon footprints, and for IT vendors and solution providers in terms of building new revenue streams.

 

In all three faces of green IT, economics and altruism are closely entwined, and will likely remain so. And it’s not a negative – in fact it’s fortunate that cost savings and carbon reduction, both desirable goals, are so closely correlated. Today, the main driver may be all the low-hanging fruit in the form of cost-effective energy conservation projects that have been overlooked, or that became economically feasible only recently as sensor and control technologies matured and reduced the cost of managing systems spread across large factories or geographic areas (such as pipelines). Over time, however, regulation and penalties for non-compliance will create new incentives for energy conservation and carbon reduction, as will consumer demand for green products and investor interest in carbon-trading schemes.

 

The important thing is to consider results more than motivations, and to look at the opportunity in the broadest possible terms. Consider service-oriented architecture (SOA): its origins lie in the need for flexibility and efficiency of development, not in environmental concern. But organisations that have invested in SOA will find it easier and less expensive to adopt new solutions, adapt to changing regulations and reporting frameworks, and integrate with partners for sustainable supply-chain management. And vice versa: vendors and integrators with SOA expertise and SOA-based solutions will have an easier time adding ‘green’ capabilities as customers and regulators demand them. Far from merely ‘greenwashing’, vendors are smart to point out such capabilities, and customers are well-advised to insist on them lest they be stuck with rigid ‘solutions’ that can’t evolve with changing green conditions and requirements.

 

All three ‘faces’ of green IT – green computing, green substitution and green solutions – have roles to play in combating climate change, and each has its own set of economic incentives. The largest of these – so new that no clear leaders have emerged, let alone established defensible market positions – is the opportunity to help organizations of all types reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions throughout their operations.