Greenpeace has thrown down the gauntlet (by which I mean mouse pad) and issued the Cool IT Challenge, “a campaign to turn IT industry leaders into climate advocates and solution providers.” From their About page:
This website exposes the gap between what the IT industry could do to fight climate change, and what they’re doing today. As the leaderboard shows, there’s a long way to go (hint: They’re scored out of 100). [Note that as of this posting, the scorecard's best rating was a measly 29.]
The Cool IT Challenge is a climate change campaign born of the experience of the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics: Public pressure, humour and a bit of luck can move even the most stubborn industry giants into action.
Why start a climate campaign for the IT crowd?
Our planet is on the brink of runaway climate change and the consequences will be catastrophic. Our changing climate affects everyone.
The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector creates two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the bad news. The good news is that its services and products could cut the world’s emissions by an estimated 15 percent when applied in industry, buildings, transport and power sectors. Smart 2020, A report by The Climate Group on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), with independent analysis by McKinsey & Company, has all the details.
Politicians will meet in Copenhagen this December to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. A strong Copenhagen deal will create the right market conditions for a massive roll-out of smart technologies — the stuff that the IT industry makes. So you might expect IT CEOs to be lobbying governments for a strong deal? Well they’re not… yet.
Assessment 1: May 2009
The first results of the Greenpeace Cool IT Challenge expose the IT industry’s inadequate leadership in tackling climate change despite its claim to have the immense potential to enable 15 percent cuts or more in all global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (Source: Smart2020 Report).
To really deliver on this potential the IT industry needs to look beyond just cutting its own emissions and deliver climate solutions for the rest of the economy while urgently using its influence to call upon world leaders to deliver a climate saving deal at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.
The Cool IT Challenge will be updated regularly, with the second version debuting in August.
(You can find the report mentioned above and more information about Smart2020 on the project’s web site.)
Based on my personal experience in the computer business, I enthusiastically agree.
I’ve contended for a long time that one of the biggest sources of wasted energy in the IT sector is caused by Windows, specifically its boot times that you can measure with a sundial.[1] I’m convinced that this is why so many users leave their PC’s on 24/7: It’s the only way to get a quick start up time, and they don’t see the immediate cost of leaving a PC on constantly, as that expense only shows up at the end of the month, and even then it’s blended in with all of their other electricity consumption. (Perhaps we need to steal an idea from those instantaneous MPG meters in some cars and create a little desktop widget that lets you configure a power consumption level and price of electricity so it can show you how much your PC usage has added to our electricity bill in the current session and month. Hmm. Might be time to whip out ye olde programming tools.) Each individual laptop or desktop PC doesn’t consume much power, but multiply that by a lot of hours and then by many millions of PCs just in the US, and you’re talkin’ about some pretty hefty energy waste.
The other area where IT people really do a poor job is data center cooling. The numbers I’ve seen say that for every watt consumed by hardware to do real work, it takes another 1.0 to 1.5 watts to cool it. Add to that the fact that many data centers have horribly misconfigured and mismanaged cooling, which typically run 24/7, of course, and the amount of waste is staggering.
Why, one might well ask, would IT managers not be much more aggressive about squeezing waste out of their operations? I think the answer lies in two factors:
First, good old fashioned inertia and ultra conservative practices. They’ve done things one way for years and had very little trouble with hardware outages, so they’re extremely hesitant to mess with their operations, particularly when it comes to cooling data centers. Many people in that business will choose to stay the course, even if they’re pretty sure they’re paying more for cooling than is truly necessary, rather than make a change to save some money and wind up triggering a much more expensive failure because they didn’t adequately cool their hardware.
Second, many facilities have cut personnel to dangerously low levels. They’ve taken “doing more with less” from a hackneyed slogan to a fetish, and in the process created an environment where their people are running as fast as they can just to keep even with “must do” work. There’s simply no human resource available to evaluate and implement any sort of data center reorganization plan.
But there is a lot that can be done, even in such a strained environment. New, less power hungry chips and disk drives will reduce the energy appetite of PCs and data centers, without the owners even realizing it. Plus, the continued adoption of virtualization technologies in data centers can often let them do the same job with less hardware. And who knows, maybe some day PC users will learn to turn off their bloody systems at night, along with their cable modems and networking gear.
Hey, a computer and energy geek can dream, can’t he?
[1] Here I’m talking about real world boot times, not a synthetic benchmark that boots a fresh installation with nothing at all added. Firing up Windows and waiting for it and your obligatory Internet security software package to reach a usable state (meaning it’s no longer saturating the disk with I/O and making even the simplest action painfully slow) is a study in annoyance.
