Connect life and work

Just getting to and from the workplace generates a lot of carbon emission. Millions of commuters spend hours every day on roads, spewing immense amounts of exhaust into the atmosphere. Additional there are a lot of business trips, whether it is for a one hour discussion or a week-long conference. All this traffic is responsible for a huge amount of emissions and is also expensive.

The following chart shows us the total costs of business trips German enterprises spent between 2004 and 2008:

Especially short trips offer a significant potential for saving emissions and costs by using telecommunication solutions that enable remote collaboration. This does not only apply to large businesses, because there are also high-quality systems available for small and medium-sized companies. New videoconferencing systems enable realistic face-to-face communication, permitting virtual meetings that are as effective as real ones. Technical innovations led to a broad acceptance and let people collaborate in virtually any situation, independently of their geographical location.

There are some different tools available. The most powerful tool is the so called “Telepresence”. It displays participants on life-size screens that make them seem to be actually present in the room. These tools can effectively replace many business trips. Moreover with these solutions also employees could work at home, this saves not only time and office space, but most importantly, eliminates the need to commute.

Green IT in the office

Even without implementing the newest technology, significant energy savings can be realized by sensitizing employees to change their habit. Company policies will help making employees aware of how they can contribute to save energy. Examples are: using of hibernation mode and changing power-management settings of the hardware, duplex printing and generally avoiding unnecessary printouts to save paper and energy.

Each office PC offers opportunities to save energy, by using hibernation mode and changing power-management settings. The latest generation of energy-efficient office PCs can reduce energy costs by more than 60 %, because of their better power units, storage technology and processors. Latest LCD screens and thin-client architecture offers further huge opportunities for saving energy and energy costs.

The Germany based “Fraunhofer Institut” found out that replacing a conventionally PC with a thin client reduces the carbon emissions of the system by over 54 %. Moreover thin clients provide further benefits. Since they are much lighter, more compact and consist of fewer components, they are producing fewer costs for transportation and disposal, and less consumption of material.

Here is a sample calculation: a company with 300 workstations that equips 75 % of them with thin clients can prevent the emission of about 148 metric tons of carbon emissions over the course of five years. By comparison: this is the amount of carbon emissions that a Volkswagen Golf would emit if it travelled a distance of 1,093,000 kilometres – 27 times the circumference of the earth...

Green IT can help to curb an alarming trend!

Did you know that Information Technology now causes the release of as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as nearly 320 million cars?

All over the world, in business and also in the private sector IT is playing an increasingly important role. IT is consuming ever greater amounts of energy and is therefore the source of significant CO² emissions. According to calculations by consultants A.T. Kearney, worldwide IT now generates CO² emissions of about 600 million metric tons a year.

Today I want to show you a study of the Germany based “Borderstep Institut” about the current and expected energy consumption of servers and data centres in Germany.

There are more than three million data centres in the world! Germany’s data centres alone consume over 10 TWh of power a year. The “Borderstep Institut” predicts that until 2013 this figure will climb by nearly half unless policymakers, IT vendors and data centre operators take steps to boost efficiency. Green IT can help curb this alarming trend. Simply by consequently implementing known energy-conserving Green IT approaches, the IT-related CO² emissions can be nearly halved.

What means Green IT?

Actually I’m writing my bachelor thesis about Green IT and I thought it would be a good idea to share my acquired knowledge about this interesting and upcoming topic. But what means Green IT? It refers to environmentally sustainable computing or IT. Moreover it’s about the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using and recycling of information technology efficiently and effectively with minimal impact on the environment. The main goal of Green IT is maximizing energy efficiency during an IT product’s lifetime. I guess Adrian T. Sobotta’s definition can also help to understand the meaning of Green IT:

“The concept of Green IT consists of two main building blocks - ‘green’ and ‘information technology’. The ‘green’ in Green IT refers to the environmentally sustainable application of Information Technologies. In our context ‘green’ is to be understood in relation to the environmental problem of climate change and emission of greenhouse gases. Green IT describes a situation where Information Technologies support reductions of greenhouse gas emissions - directly, indirectly or in a systemic way.“

Since the information technology started with its triumphal procession in the last decades, many things changed. Beside of the private live IT conquered also most of the production- and service sectors. Concerning to the booming internet usage and the increasing penetration of IT more and more computing power was needed. Consequently it leaded to strongly increasing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Now it’s our turn to be aware of sustainable energy usage. There are many already known Green IT arrangements with which we are able to reduce IT-related energy consumption and energy costs.

Leaving a copier switched on overnight uses as much power as it takes to make 1,500 compies ...