As the day-to-day use of ICT continues to rise, concern is growing about the carbon emissions indirectly caused by the manufacture of the electronics that litter our lives and the steady rise in the electricity required to power our personal devices and data centres. However, the debate should be less about ICT’s tiny contribution to global warming and more about how ICT can be used to reduce carbon emissions across society.
Over the last two years there has been a lot of debate about what the embedded energy of a PC or server is compared with how much power it uses. I have crunched the numbers and believe that the figure for a server is about 1,000,000 Watt-hours (1MWh). Here is how I worked it out, and why it means that you should sweat the desktops but replace the servers.
On 10th February I took part in a panel session at the 2009 Intellect Annual Regent Conference “Keeping ahead of changing markets”. The event took place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London, was attended by top executives from the high-tech industry and was chaired by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, who I left speechless at one point!
I was recently asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the differences between traditional IT infrastructure outsourcing and “Cloud Computing”. When you get down to it, there are only really three differences between the two, but that does not stop Cloud being a significant threat to the old-guard of IT consultancies.
Back in February this year I tool part in one of a series of video debates on green IT hosted by the BCS as one of four “industry experts”. The topic was “IT policies and your green credentials”. Watch the video here…
The Government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme aims to reduce absolute carbon dioxide emissions from large non-energy intensive organisations in both the public and private sector. In this article I discuss the impact of the CRC on data centres and why it will likely be counter-productive in the context of reducing carbon emissions.
A few weeks ago I was party to an initial ‘getting together’ in BAFTA of some key greenie people from the IT industry (me and Emma Fryer, author of many of Intellect’s thought-leadership documents and responses to government policy in the field of carbon reduction) with leaders from the media and entertainment industry. One of the contenscious topics is around the environmental damage of CDs compared with downloads. In this article I will calculate both using common sense and first principals.
The British Computer Society’s Data Centre Specialist Group has released a beta version of their data centre cost and energy simulator to members of the specialist group. The simulator has come out of the Carbon Trust’s Low Carbon Collaboration initiative jointly funded by BCS and Romonet. Here are my first impressions from the preview a few weeks ago.
This post has now been superseded by my updated
People keep going around and around in circles on the debate of whether you should replace servers and desktops sooner rather than later when you take into account the improvements in energy efficiency in recent years combined with the embedded energy cost of manufacture of computers. So, I decided to get out my calculator and [...]