Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
Breaking the Ice
Two years ago this February, I went for a routine exam at a major hospital center here in Boston. I was sitting on the exam table, dressed in my disposable gown. As I dangled my feet over the exam table, I looked at the PC in the corner. It was on. So was the monitor, which was showing the Windows screen saver. I remembered seeing computers in other rooms, all on, with the Windows screen saver running. I asked my doctor: “Does anyone shut these off at night?” The answer was no.
I thought I would try some back-of-the-envelope calculations to gauge potential power management savings. The average computer at that time consumed 100 watts per hour. The monitor, an old-fashioned CRT, added another 83 watts. If there were 100 such computer setups in the exam rooms and administrative areas, the hospital would require 18.3 kilowatts per hour to power them. At a rate of 15 cents per kilowatt, that’s a $160,300 annual cost just to power the a subset of the IT equipment.
When I got back to my office, I emailed the hospital’s CFO. Three weeks later, I received an email from one of his employees. He said that I had some energy saving ideas that might be worth exploring. He invited me to come to his office for a meeting.
And that’s where the story ends. Why? Because I had a crisis of confidence. I couldn’t believe that this prestigious teaching hospital with an annual operating budget of $500 million needed me to tell them how much electricity they could save through power management. Besides, what if I was wrong? Although Tech Networks had just been written up on the front page of the Boston Globe for our energy-saving Earth-PCs, I was by no means an expert on Green IT at that point.
Instead of going to meet with them, I referred them to a company that specializes in power management software. I checked in with the company’s sales rep a few months later. He said that there had not been a sale.
If that hospital had implemented power-management software, they could have reduced the electricity required to power those PCs by 60%. In terms of CO2 emissions, that’s the same as taking 83 passenger vehicles off the road. What if I had managed to win them over?
I drive a Prius. But even if I drove my Prius for 100 years, I couldn’t match the CO2 savings achievable by turning on power management on this hospital’s PCs for just a single year.
I subsequently realized that my company has an important role to play in helping other businesses transition to a more sustainable form of computing. Information Technology is a resource requiring massive amounts of labor and materials to design, build, deploy, use, decommission and destroy. Our mission has always been to help people use this technology. But our mission now is to help people use the right technology in the right ways. And that technology must be respectful of our planet.
In order to be viable in the context of today’s economic challenges, it is important that each sustainability initiative be both cost- and time-effective. Specific Green IT solutions make economic sense for some businesses but not for others. Without a full understanding of business needs, it is impossible to determine what computing solutions will best meet them.
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If you like this then please subscribe to the Negawatts
Negawatts: The watts saved when a decision is made to save electricity not through efficiency but simply by ceasing to perform the activity that required electricity. For example, many companies have discontinued scheduled full virus scans, thereby saving the energy that was required to scan the entire hard drive. I got this term from a white paper on Green IT from KPMG.
I love the term “negawatts.” It invites us to re-examine every routine activity from a utilitarian perspective. Does the client really need a redundant power supply on every server? What if Tech Networks just kept a few HP server power supplies on hand in case of emergency? If an hour of downtime for some servers is acceptable, why not save electricity and resources by ordering a server with just one power supply? Anyway, a server with redundant power supplies is not truly redundant. The circuit board that allows power supply failover is a single point of failure.
Here’s another area where negawatts make sense: Stop leaving your office computer on at night so that you can access it remotely. There are so many other ways for you to get email and files without leaving your computer on. Remote access software vendors need to own up to the fact that their software forces subscribers to waste energy.
At Tech Networks, most employees use their own laptop to access company resources. Whether they are at the office, at home, or at an Internet cafe, the process is the same.
Many of us take the commuter rail to the office. With a broadband card, we are able to hook up and get the day started early. Our resource manager starts deploying the troops from his seat on the train at 6:00AM.
Tech Networks also pays for 50% of employees’ public transportation passes. I guess keeping cars off the road doesn’t earn us negawatts, but it sure counts as negamiles!
It’s Not Easy Being Green
It may be trite to begin a Green IT blog post by stealing a line from Kermit the Frog. But this misappropriated malapropos repeats in my mind as we grapple with our Sustainable IT methodology. It’s not easy being green. We are fighting climate change, which means that we need to slow the warming of a planetary weather system. How could it be easy? So far, worldwide efforts to go green are a failure. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise and even the rate at which they increase is increasing.
It is for good reason that environmental writers such as Thomas Friedman and Bill McKibben deride the glib green-washing group of copy writers crowing over their ten easy steps green guides. Bill McKibben’s group, 350.org, makes the case that we need to lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350ppm as quickly as possible or risk global climate catastrophe.
Into this climate cacophony steps Greener Gadgets with their upcoming Green Gadget conference in New York. This event was brought to my attention by Roger Bruist, our new Green Technology Architect. My initial reaction was entirely negative. A gadget is usually an ingeniously engineered article whose function is often less important than its design. I’m of the belief that we need to go back to basics to save the planet. Too many of the gadgets I see around our office are cheap toys hawked by sites such as Think Geek.com
On closer examination, however, it appears that that the green gadgeteers have put together a program that addresses many of the same issues we confront as we build our Sustainable IT methodology. Given the real energy and resource costs of PC manufacturing, when is it responsible to replace existing equipment with more efficient models? How do we bring technology to the developing world in areas that need to develop a power infrastructure not based on our current carbon-intensive model? It looks like I’ll be taking the train to New York in a couple of months to find out.
Use it up, wear it out, make it do…. or do without!
An old New England saying goes: Use it up, wear it out, make it do…. or do without!
The rapid evolution in computer technology has made seem that attempting to be frugal with office computers is penny-wise but pound-foolish. Anyone who has tried to keep a computer longer than three years knows how frustrating it can be to wait for their computer to start up in the morning.
So you purchase a new computer. But what happens to the old one? No one seems to know what to do with all these outdated computers. Of the 63 million tons of U.S. computer equipment taken out of service annually, only 25% is recycled or landfilled. The rest of our electronic waste (e-waste) is stockpiled, like nuclear waste and other toxic substances that are not conveniently disposed of.
E-waste contains many substances that are harmful to human and animal health, such as barium, beryllium, cadmium, mercury, lead, and dioxins released when the computer is burned.
How can you make sure that you are not contributing to the problem? In this article we list eight new rules for sustainable computing in the spirit of good old Yankee frugality.
(Re)-use It
- 1. Buy EPEAT-certified equipment.
The Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) was developed by the Green Electronics Council. EPEAT-certified computers are ranked based on criteria such as power management capabilities, the amount of hazardous material it contains, the amount of recyclable materials used and how easily the unit can be disassembled when it reaches end of life.
- 2. Give your old computer to charity The trick here is to make sure that the old computer still has useable word processing software and that it can browse the Internet. No one wants a computer that takes ten minutes to load a web page. If the computer is not suitable for donation, make sure that you dispose of it responsibly. Consult the Basel Action Network (www.BAN.org) for a certified recycler who will not export your computer overseas.
(Don’t) Wear It Out
•3. Enable power management on your computer.
Power management software is used to put your computer in a sleep state if it is not used for a period of time. A computer and monitor left on can use over $300 of electricity per year. Computer equipment will last longer if it is set to “hibernate” when not in use.
•4. Get longer wear from your laptop battery
Laptops use about half as much power as a PC. But the battery can be a source of additional pollution and expense. Batteries are only capable of a finite number of charges. To extend the life of your laptop battery, remove your laptop battery when your laptop is plugged in to a power outlet. To know when to recharge your battery, you should determine if it is lithium-ion or nickel cadmium. A lithium ion battery should be recharged before it is completely depleted, discharging it completely once per month. A nickel-cadmium battery, more commonly used in older laptops, should be fully depleted and recharged each time.
Make It Do
•5. Move to thin client computing.
A thin client is a device that depends on the main server for processing. A thin client has several advantages such as decreasing the need for technical support, being less susceptible to viruses, being smaller and less costly, and storing data more safely. Thin clients do not “wear out” or become outdated like personal computers. Feeling even more frugal? You can use any old workstation as a thin client without any upgrades at all.
- 6. Turn your computers and equipment off.
Plug your computer into a power strip that can be shut off when it is not in use. So-called “Vampire power” (power used even when the device is turned off) can consume up to 10% of your electric bill.
Or Do Without..
•7. Consolidate your servers.
With server virtualization technology, one server can take the place of four or five servers. This means that many small businesses can safely reduce their servers down to a single physical server.
- 8. Use web-based software.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is software you run while connected to a server on the Internet. Data is stored online, which means that you will not lose your work if your hard drive dies. Web-based software is convenient because it can be accessed anywhere at anytime and it never needs upgrades. It also can reduce or eliminate the need for your organization to purchase a server.
I wrote this article to appear in the December 2008 edition of the Third Sector New England newsletter.
The Second Declaration
A book written by a 24-year old futurist, called “The Second Generation,” has sold more than 4 million copies in China. The book reveals author Wang Xiaoping’s great dream: Immortality and infinite joy for mankind. How will this dream be achieved? Ms. Xiaoping believes that science and technology are becoming so advanced, that we are reaching the point when computers and machines can begin to design and build ever-more powerful versions of themselves.
With these super-machines, we will confer upon ourselves supernatural powers, such as genius intelligence, high morality, perfect beauty, day-long ecstasy and even immortality. That is, of course, if we can just get through this current rough patch where we have invented machines powerful enough to kill us but not yet powerful enough to save us by making us wise.