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.

Green Concerns, Small Steps

I learned with surprise this morning, during an internal global con-call on IT projects, that our compnay is the no. 3 polluter in the Bay area (west coast, USA). For a company with a high commitment to HES (health, environment and safety), this is quite a not-so-good news, if not to say a bit embarrassing. I have not yet made any further checks as to whether it's coming from refinery, oil-gas exploration-prodcution, or other stuffs. More importantly, serious green initiatives are now being undertaken.

Within the energy industry, efforts have been projected toward finding and establishing more on renewable energy. While this would be a future answer to the current sky-rocketing of oil prices, it would also be good energy alternatives that are more environment-friendly. Getohermal energy production has been praised for reducing CO2 footprints as compared to oil and gas mining. Reduction of CO2 footptints shall also be directed toward those manfucturing plants and industrial complex. In this regard, the one that was quite impressive a long time ago while living there was Yokohama in Japan. It was surprisingly clean air amidts a large number of plants operating day-by-day. They were fueled by LNG - liquified natural gas -, a clean energy solution.

What can we do as an individual to help our mother earth sustain our lives ? While some has powerful authority to excercise positive impacts (and need to do so), we can start small steps on our parts. There are stuffs that contribute directly to high emsision or carbons (bad motor exhaust for example) and also those daily "products" we use that the making process are involving carbon emissions or the disposal that would create environmental issue (plastics). Get good care of our cars and bikes as not to pollute our air. Use as approriate, not more than necessary: water, electricity (switch off when we are out of the rooms)... and those computer generated products we use daily. Don't print anything than necessary. A lot more of other stuffs that seems to be small, yet would contribute to the better of our living environment.