Throughout history, technology has been a double-edged sword for environmental impacts. We tend to forget, for example, that just 100 years ago, cars were in many ways saviours from the environmental chaos brought about by the use of millions of horses in our cities. It was only later that cars were seen as having their own environmental consequences.
Likewise with information and communication technology (ICT) and the digital revolution of recent years. These technologies are no longer for geeks and the fringes of society. They are part of the daily life of billions, and increasingly a backbone of our economies.
On the one hand, the use of ICT has a positive environmental impact – think of journeys saved by teleconferencing, and the paper saved by using emails. But on the other, the ICT sector also contributes to climate change. Some estimate ICT products and services are responsible for 8 to 10% of the EU’s electricity consumption and 2.5 to 4% of its carbon emissions. This contribution is growing and may double by 2020. With that in mind, it is time for the ICT sector to start playing an active role in climate change action.
Most evidence points to the manufacturing phase of ICT as the largest environmental footprint of the sector. But there are also significant energy needs in data centres. While definite numbers are hard to calculate, the most accurate information suggests that, by 2020, data centres in Western Europe could consume around 100 billion kilowatt hours each year – that’s around the same as the current total electricity consumption of the Netherlands!
Addressing this huge rise in energy consumption first requires transparency from the sector. We need a consistent way to find out where the emissions in the sector are really coming from, and to measure the environmental footprint across the sector.
Transparency will also help spread the many energy-saving ideas that already exist. From using natural air ventilation in data centres to avoid energy-intensive cooling, to capturing and re-using the heat to warm up nearby office space. Or you could simply extend the life of or recycle devices: not many people realise that one ton of mobile phones yields around 400 grams of gold—80 times more than you could get from a ton of gold ore in the ground.
Once we have a transparent way to measure, we can start in earnest to audit, report, and exchange best practice in the ICT sector. Not to mention including ICT energy efficiency criteria in procurement decisions.
This is why the European Commission has persuaded three leading standards development organisations and a prominent greenhouse gas accounting initiative to pool their measurement efforts. Under our new initiative these organisations will examine the whole sector, the whole lifecycle and the scalability of these methods.
That means measuring everything from the supply of raw materials to their recycling. Measuring not only what it takes to make products like a laptop, but also the impact of services like hosting data in the cloud. It means that in the near future we will be able to measure the ICT environmental footprint of whole cities or countries, including the positive environmental effects that ICT enables.
Several major ICT companies and organisations from Europe, Asia and the US are now trialling such measurement solutions. And from this month onwards, nearly 30 players have joined the European Commission to broaden and speed up the effort. We call on more and more such players to get involved.
Quite aside from the benefits of keeping energy costs down, we must make sure that the smart economy of the future is also sustainable. Information technology is moving to the centre stage of our lives. It’s time it moved to the centre stage of climate action too.
More details: www.ict-footprint.com
Email This Post
RSS comments feed on this entry
Dear reader,
I’m working for The Green Web Foundation <www.thegreenwebfoundation.org> that has developed browser addons that can show while surfing (and even while searching with google, bing and yahoo) if a site is grey or green hosted. We’re checking 75.000 sites a day now, but have the capacity to grow a lot.
Thanks for your attention!
René Post, Leiden (NL).
Good blog. Nice to see the focus on datacenters and energy consumption.
Datacenters will (also in the future) remain big energy consumers, especially with the adoption of more cloud and mobile technologies. All the data storage, transport and processing power has to be located somewhere…
EU datacenters can already implement the energy best practices by the EU Datacenter Code of Conduct http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative_data_centers.htm
To be able to see where all the energy is going, good metrics need to be developed. The Green Grid ( http://www.thegreengrid.org ) has done a great job in developing some of these like the PUE, WUE and CUE. For the industry and IT sector it would be very beneficial to have global metrics and have them harmonized with standards bodies like ISO and CENELEC.
Besides the current metrics, the industry needs to focus on a holistic datacenter view that incorporates all layers of energy consumption. From cooling up to efficient code and programming. The full stack approach; http://www.datacenterpulse.org/FocusAreas/Stack
The procurement of Green energy should also be a focus for datacenter owners. This requires two actions:
1. more transparency in the energy & utility market; how green is green energy?
2. competitive energy prices for Green Energy
If a company buys green energy, than this organization is creating zero CO2 emissions. Meaning your data center creates zero CO2 emissions by using green energy. Simple solution to have a CO2 emissions neutral data center for the usage phase, or not?
It is a fact that most energy is used and most CO2 emissions take place during the production phase of IT equipment. Recently, Apple published their carbon footprint figures for the first time and they showed that 61% of total carbon emissions take place during the production phase.( http://www.apple.com/environment/ ) However, most IT manufacturers are notoriously vague about their carbon footprint and how much CO2 is emitted during production. DURABILIT in the Netherlands has developed the DURABILIT Greener Network Calculator ( http://www.durabilit.eu/Plone/services/durabilit-greener-network-calculator ) which calculates the amount of CO2 emissions that are reduced when companies purchase used or refurbished network equipment rather than new equipment. This sounds like low-hanging fruit, but the total emissions of CO2 that can be achieved by re-use are between 50-70% over the total lifecycle of the equipment. Most IT equipment that is re-used is current equipment, so users do not need to make any compromise on functionality when they purchase used equipment. Re-use of IT equipment is something that is generally overlooked by most companies, but can be a significant contributor to carbon footprint reduction. We need to have a paradigm shift whereby users become more aware of the fact that current, already produced IT equipment can and does fulfill their needs and should therefore be preferred instead of new equipment which still needs to be produced.