Government, Energy efficiency, Energy consumption
Morse Identifies Loopholes in CRC Regulations
The government is not talking about energy efficiency with the CRC, it is talking about energy consumption and, as a result, they have lost track of the underlying principles involved, said Murray. If it is about energy efficiency, they need to take renewable energy into account and find some way of measuring the power efficiency of an organisation, which is not easy to do. [...] The CRC absolutely needs to be amended, Murray said. I understand the government's process to get to CRC, as IT is one of the biggest causes of carbon emissions at number 3. However number two is transport and number one is land use, which the government seems to have ignored. [...] Murray believes it is vital that the industry pushes for amendments to the bill. I have been in touch with the BCS and Offshoring Association, both of whom are against the bill, but they are at the end of their thether as they haven't got any joy out of the government about changes. [...]
Morse Identifies Loopholes in CRC Regulations
The UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment is now called the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme and is due to begin in April 2010. However Morse feels it has the potential to pose a serious threat to UK businesses and could even have little, no or possibly negative effect on global emissions. [...] The CRC effectively targets what the government feels is the most energy consumptive companies, and is not based on energy consumption over a year, rather it is based on power consumption, Murray said, speaking to eWEEK Europe. [...] The other serious loophole that Morse has identified is that the CRC does not do enough to take into account where energy comes from. For example, an organisation taking all of its energy from renewable sources such as a wind farm or solar, is treated exactly the same as one relying on non-renewable power such as a coal fired power station. [...]
Green Experts Pour Cold Water On Sweating IT Assets
eWeek Europe UK recently caught up with two experts in IT energy efficiency to discuss the issue. John Tuccillo is chairman of the board for international data centre energy specialist The Green Grid, and Zhal Limbuwala is chair of the British Computer Society data centre specialist group. [...] The Green Grid is a consortium of IT vendors - including Intel, Microsoft and AMD - and end-users of IT, which aims to develop tools and approaches to help its members improve the energy efficiency of their data centres. The BCS data centre specialist group is one of the 40 or so sub-organisations of the British Computer Society - also known as The Chartered Institute For IT - focused on similar issues to the Green Grid. [...] But alongside the focus on energy efficiency, some experts, including representatives from UK government, have begun to look to the IT industry to expand its sustainable horizons to include the entire life-cycle of technology. For example one study from the University of Tokyo estimates that of the total carbon debt of a PC through its life-cycle, 75 percent is incurred during the manufacturing phase. [...]
Greenwave: Smart Meters Need Smart Sockets
Greenwave is very much focused on educating consumers about their energy consumption, and strengthening the relationship between utilities and consumers by giving consumers more visibility into their energy consumption, thereby ultimately reducing their power bills. [...] An American company, Greenwave Reality, is seizing the opportunity in carbon-conscious Europe to address that last point. While the smart meter watches the overall electrical consumption, Greenwave is selling smart sockets which - it says - can take the grunt work out of understanding the details of the energy usage of each individual device. [...] The key thing is that we are focused on the consumer market only, Greg Memo, CEO of GreenWave Reality told eWEEK Europe UK. The way we do that is by monitoring and controlling devices in the home, so consumers can understand their energy consumption. [...]
Green Experts Pour Cold Water On Sweating IT Assets
Green Grid was established to improve energy efficiency in data centres and business computing ecosystems. [...] Also, about 18 months ago, the Green Grid extended into Japan with Green Grid Japan. Take a look at the Green Grid Data Centre Design Guide - another collaboration point with BCS - which enables folks to be able to take into account what is the best mix of resources to deliver an energy-efficient data centre and what are the regional implications of that kind of a design. [...] Q. Is sweating assets really an issue that the IT industry wants to engage with It makes sense for vendors to discuss energy efficiency as it enables them to sell new energy efficient kit. But the concept of selling less equipment that customers keep for longer seems a harder sell. [...]
IT: Part of the Problem, or Part of the Solution?
Networks could also be greener. Every click you make, search engines are using energy, he says, echoing widely reported and disputed stories about the energy consumption of Google searches. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that story, there are ways to reduce Internet energy consumption, for instance with content networks that store files more locally, he says. [...] Despite this, he wants to make devices more efficient. We are working with manufacturers to make sure that power saving standby modes are standardised. And he's even more determined on power supplies. [...]
Moore’s Law - Still Driving Down The IT Footprint
Using as an example the buying of music at shops, Koomey's research concludes that downloading music yields 40 to 80 percent reductions compared to buying a CD, taking into account such issues as the network's energy usage, packaging and production, distribution, travel and a host of other energy consumption factors. [...] The other two papers - Assessing trends over time in performance, costs and energy use for servers and Assessing trends in the electrical efficiency of computation over time - focus on trends on computing. [...] For example, if a data centre is owned by one organisation, it will tend to have similar types of user who use its resources at similar times of day, leading to usage peaks and troughs. Troughs mean under-used resources and both wasted capital and energy. [...]
Why The Mainframe Will Never Die
We will also continue to improve the capacity of our systems with respect to processor, memory and I/O performance. As we do so, we will remain focused on efficient use of data centre resources. Each successive generation of the IBM mainframe has made improvements in the area of energy consumption. [...] An IBM System z10 Enterprise Class mainframe has the equivalent capacity of nearly 1,500 x86 servers, with an 85 percent smaller footprint and up to 85 percent lower energy costs. An IBM System z10 Business Class server has the capacity of up to 232 x86 servers with an 83 percent smaller footprint and up to 93 percent lower energy costs. [...] System Costs Mainframe / Server Power Energy / Security Power Energy Systems st. [...]
Will BT’s Wind Farm Come To Grief?
Even though the government may be strictly correct in ruling that BT cannot count its carbon reduction twice, Tuppen said it was wrong in spirit - and would slow the move towards renewable energy. The government needs every possible way it can get renewable electricity. [...] BT's energy use is a complex matter. Half its energy use goes on running the network and removing the heat produced by its computers, from its data centres and offices, said Tuppen. The company has worked to reduce the energy used in its networks, and data-centres. [...] The CRC cap-and-trade scheme also needs a lot more thought, he said. All large energy consuming companies that aren't already covered by an emisssions-trading scheme will go into a cap-and trade system from 2010 onwards. If any organisation has a consumption greater than 6000MWhr per annum, it will have to buy the right to use that energy. [...]
Green IT Must Look Beyond Cost Cutting
But doing all of this stuff isn't going to be enough, stressed Mingay. [Organisations] absolutely need to be able to demonstrate that the energy consumption has reduced potentially. And they need to prove that and show it. Now, that's messy and difficult. And it's much easier to get on and do some of these things without actually measuring if they are having an effect, so they can also demonstrate to the wider organisation as whole that IT is making some kind of contribution to sustainability strategies. [...] So it's our view that IT organisations should be looking to demonstrate they can make 20 to 30 percent improvements in their energy consumption. But in the long term, IT is going to consume more power, not less. So it should also position itself to become an enabler of sustainable business operations and change, concluded Mingay. [...] A lot of data centres have power capacity issues and so, driving efficiencies in the data centre allows you to squeeze more kit in there. [...]
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