Going Green with IT

Last night, I was having dinner with friends and visiting colleagues from Center of the International Cooperation for Computerization (CICC), Tokyo, Japan. Having friendly talked about good past time and state of the art IT development in some Asia Pacific countries, we came to a chat about energy conservation. Some offices in Japan set the aircon to an unbeliveable 28%C to conserve energy! The buzzword is now cool-biz - no tie, no suit in the office so that your business activities would demand less (electrical) energy to consume.

It seems that energy conservation has been becoming very serious matters for the business community in Japan. Mr. Yutaka Ikeda, GM Planning & Coordination, then handed over to us a 5-page paper from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry - METI (whom CICI report to) : Green IT Initiative in Japan. This whitepaper is quite neat, addressing a framework to halving global (CO2) emissions by 2050. As a follow up of Kyoto Protocol and Heiligendamn Summit, Japan establishes US$ 10 billion fund to support developing countires with Cool Eart Partnership program, and will be investing US$ 30 billion in R & D in the environment and energy sectors over the next 5 years.

As developing countries are becoming more industrialized and the world is moving toward more information-intensive society, the need for both energy and IT are growing fast. Electricity consumption of IT devices is estimated to grow 5-fold in 2025 than that of today, as the whitepaper reports. The efforts are then directed toward two ultimate goals: minimizing energy consumption by IT use and maximizing contribution of IT to energy efficiency.

Radically going green for IT is still posing some challenges for some to take bold actions, yet opportunity are widely open. Replacing reliable IT infrastructure today with new stuffs just for going green is of great concerns. Nevertheless, there are now available to offer an array of green IT solution: wind-powered data centers, dynamic power management software to shut off power in semiconductor chips until it's needed,...

On the other side, effectively (strategically ?) using IT for minimizing energy consumption is quite real and can be expanded to contribute more. When things go virtual on daily busines practices, physical undertaking can be minimized to save energy. On-line net meetings and video conferencing facility saves people from travel, freeing from a chain of energy consumption for physical transportation. Intel uses heat recovery chillers, in its new development center building in Israel, to recover waste heat from data centers and other equipment to heat the building in winter and to provide hot water for the bathrooms and kitchens year-round. The system eliminates the need for energy-consuming gas or fuel-oil boilers and reduces CO2 and NO emission. Intel claims, in its Premier IT Magazine (Summer 2008), to save around US$ 235,000 annually due to reduced fuel consumption.

Green IT iniative should be fairly adopted by IT shop, especially those big ones managed in big organizations. Not only that it reduce energy consumption by and potential hazardous waste from IT equipment. It could be creatively taken into a next level of strategic function for maximixing its use for helping business to reduce pressure to environment and optimize energy efficiency. There might be some costs incurred in the beginning. Managed smartly, it could at the end contribute to the positive impact of the bottom line.

So, how green are you ? Green business shall be good business. Or as some are starting to say, green is beautiful.