continued from Part 1

From The Roots Up

Next up was Donna Young, BT’s head of climate change, the most grassroots-oriented of the BT speakers. What I liked about Young’s approach was that it was neither top down or bottom up, but both. Grassroots environmental advocates were supported by senior BT staff as volunteers. Young clearly believes BT’s staff will play a huge role in further improving its environmental performance. But staff need to be supported in doing so.

Employee participation is impressive. Within three weeks of initiating a company-wide grassroots environmental program, 28 local clubs were in place. BT has set up an internal blogging system (how very Greenmonk) to capture ideas and objectives of the specific carbon-busting club.

“What do people want? Recognition from senior management. If they save huge amount of money for BT they want to see a percentage of that to be spent on more green initiatives.”

Staff aren’t looking for financial compensation for innovative carbon-busting initiatives, they are looking for further investments by their employer.

Of course the real grassroots are BT customers not staff. In March BT developed a web site that didn’t sell anything. it was… a carbon calculator. Another one (yacc yacc yacc)? Young said that while there was plenty of competition in the carbon footprint calculator business, most were aimed at carbon emission offsetting. Young explained that as a Catholic she tends to see offsets as little more than “indulgences”. 

Most calculators went to offsetting, which didn’t fit our carbon busting strategy. its about changing behaviour. its about taking action. Its not just about going to confession and saying my hail marys…

I asked Young what experience BT had of fostering grassroots innovation, and how the company supported such efforts. She said she had “stolen” ideas from BT’s mycustomercup challenge, another successful employee-led program. BT plans to interlace green thinking into its broader “new ideas” scheme. If staff at a particular building find a particular way to improve efficiency, how can it be identified and rolled out more broadly? One method is to use internal wikis, to hone and share ideas.

BT and Sustainable Business Services: B2B

“At BT we’re pretty good at measuring things. We know how to calculate a carbon footprint and how to lower it.”

– Chris Tuppen

Of course you wouldn’t expect BT to say anything else, given its push into sustainable business, but you can tell a lot by a supplier by its customers.

• As a public reference Tesco, the world’s second biggest retailer, is as good as it gets. BT is working with Tesco in a number of areas including video-conferencing: every time Tesco moves a meeting from face to face to online it saves 47kilos of carbon, and reduces travel costs. Another very interesting is
• BT Expedite is a division of the company specialising in retail supply chain and logistics, helping retailers understand front end to warehouses. BT worked with OASIS, the woman’s clothing conpany and achieved savings of 20/30% on their supply chain costs; with clear environmental benefits.

BT also claims that its sales model is pull rather than push based, based on its good green reputation. In the US prospects were finding US customers were approaching BT because it was known as being a green organisation. Some wanted to publish carbon footprint for each product and supplier, showing the carbon imprints.  BT said this spend was totalled 2bn pounds last year. Customers requiring credentials from suppliers include every UK government IT contract, shoe manufacturers, and soft drinks. Walkers crisps, said BT, deserves particular mention for performing very well in terms of carbon reduction and supplier certification.

BT and Sustainable Business Services: B2C

So what about more innovative services for consumers?

One approach for BT to address consumers is in partnership with electricity companies. Between 4pm and 6pm a lot of BT infrastructure comes off the National Grid and instead BT uses local generators, because the cost of energy peaks as people come home for dinner, have a cup of tea, turn on the telly and put the dinner on. The key way to get people to reduce power demand in the home is with education, although moving from always on to always available equipment will also be important. This is one area BT’s strategy needs significant work. The broadband and wifi routers and set top boxes the firm sells to its customers are designed to be always on. Its one thing to talk about putting pressure on suppliers, its quite another to enforce the mandate and pass on the infrastructure to customers.

 

 

BT’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) group ran an analyst event a couple of months ago that told the company’s green story in some detail. I came away impressed by the way BT has identified its own competencies in this area, and plans to leverage them for profit and ecological benefit. There is money to be made in cutting carbon emissions, and I won’t begrudge BT for doing so.

There is an underlying ambition about BT’s plans that reflects the green economic tsunami we’re going to see over the next few years.

One takeaway – and I should stress this is my take, rather than a BT statement, is that the telecoms services giant sees an opportunity to compete with IBM and major services firms in the consulting-led business transformation sector as business sustainability becomes a key corporate focus. Market inflection points are market opportunities.

Key takeaways:

• BT is cutting its own emissions- top down and bottom up
• BT is helping customers cut their emissions
• BT selling video-conferencing solutions to reduce travel and related carbon expenditure

Who

So who represented BT’s views?

• Donna Young, head of climate change
• Chris Tuppen, head of sustainable development
• Steve O’Donnel, global head of data centres and customer experience management

The analyst attendance list was telling: not surprisingly Gartner and Forrester are tackling the green data center issue and sent three or four analysts each. ComputerWorldUK’s Green channel pointed to analyst interest in green issues last week.

Offset or Bust

First up was Chris Tuppen:

“Many companies have made a commitment to go for carbon neutrality. We didn’t. We went for carbon busting. Our main goal is to reduce carbon wherever we can.”

BT started on the long road to carbon reduction during the early 1990s, when it had a 2m tonne annual carbon footprint. Since 1996 it has achieved a 60% reduction in this footprint, and the next goal is an 80% reduction from 1996 levels.

While BT accounts for .7% of the UK’s electricity output it purchases 7% of the available renewable electricity.

Some Like it Hot: Turn That Cooling off!

What about BT’s purchasing power? Tuppen said BT has shown leadership in forcing suppliers to be more energy efficient, a theme Steve O’Donnel expanded upon. Telecoms equipment, after all, is generally air-cooled. O’Donnel explained:

“Its about how hot the equipment can run, allowing it to work in a sensible way. Make us equipment we can run at very high temperatures.”

Good stuff, if somewhat counter-intuitive. We’re (air-) conditioned to think cooler means better. Refrigeration costs however are generally higher than heat losses: at least 50% of total energy is used in refrigeration, a cost telcos have long eschewed.

“As a telephone company we have always used air-cooling. ideally we buy equipment that runs at ambient temperatures. We’re engaging with the IT vendors on this. Our entire 21st Century Network estate runs on fresh air-cooling“.

BT mandates affect major suppliers such as Cisco, HP, and Sun, but also smaller vendors. Equipment supporting BT’s 21st Century Network must be able to operate effectively at up to 50 degrees C, well above the usual 22 degree data center (O’Donnel claims the 22 number was arbitrarily created to support a particular IBM mainframe tape drive)

O’Donnel also spoke to an idea which Sun’s Whitfield Diffie, the father of democratized encryption, also strongly advocates.

“Why not use winter weather to cool equipment?”

Why not, indeed? Doing so certainly makes more sense than using air-conditioning in cold weather.

BT examines all aspects of a product’s lifecycle, from creation to disposal, in working with suppliers. The company is also currently checking all of its electric assets to ensure that anything which isn’t actually doing something is switched off.

BT wants equipment to be always available rather than always on.

Telecoms Outgreens IT

O’Donnel refused to name BT’s “most green” suppliers but he was certainly scathing about IT companies performance in this area compared to BT’s.

“Traditional data center suppliers are more interested in tweaking the edges. I think we’re light years ahead of HP and IBM in in electrical and mechanical systems.”

Talking about earlier equipment purchasing, in a 15 year cycle, O’Donnel said decisions taken “back then are albatrosses around our necks.”

BT breaks down energy consumption like so: With legacy equipment 50% on power, 50% on refrigeration. The company estimates it can save 85% of the refrigeration costs, and between 20/35% of the actual power consumed.

AC/DC and Compliance

A signficant contributory factor to power inefficiency is the repeated transformation from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) supplies and back again. Today, and in future, all BT data center equipment will be DC-supplied.

BT isn’t mucking about. The firm is, for example, carrying out a full audit of all backups across the company, ensuring it is only backing up data when it should, and only keeps data for as long as it needs to. We’re not talking Sarbanes-Oxley 404 here, but a different set of compliance constraints for records management.

When the biggest companies in the world start talking about the efficiencies and green characteristics of tape versus disc you know the world has changed.

“Why leave it all on disc? Tape is the greenest storage medium.”

Part 2 to follow …

It is customary with the launch of something new, to offer a “Hello World” and so I will borrow my colleague Stephen O’Grady‘s tried and trusted Q&A format for the purpose.

Q: What is GreenMonk?

A: GreenMonk Associates aims to bring grassroots, open source and social media thinking to the emerging green and clean technology sectors. At this point its a blog and a loose affiliation of like minds, with associated projects.

Q: Who is GreenMonk?

A: The point man is James Governor, one of the founders of RedMonk, a boutique industry analyst firm founded in 2002 specialising in infrastructure software, which makes extensive use of open source and social software in its business. Redmonk generally focuses on practitioners, people that do stuff -developers, engineers, architects and sysadmins – in analysing the market, rather than trying to compete with Gartner for C-level attention, which gives us a fairly unique perspective.

Q: Who else is involved?

A: GreenMonk began life as a joint venture with the Movement Design Bureau, a thinktank looking at the future of movement in all its forms. One of the Bureau’s first projects is to help foster AKVO, a resource for clean water initiatives in emerging nations (“The Open Source For Water”)- India in the first instance. Mark Charmer and Joseph Simpson are behind MDB – and as you can see from the Bollywood-style poster they are not afraid of imaginative messaging. I am also working with James Cherkoff of Collaborate Marketing on some related projects.

Q: Why aren’t other RedMonk analysts like Stephen and Cote‘ involved?

A: Redmonk is our business, while Greenmonk is a separate initiative. It is not a RedMonk business unit at this point. Of course Stephen and Cote can contribute if they want to- but they have lives and day jobs.

Q: Why bother with green issues?

A: My son is nearly two, which is one reason. To be honest I have always been a bit of a tree hugger, but now the mainstream is waking up it makes sense to make some public noise in this regard. Its about being a 21st century citizen.

Q: How do you think you can make a difference?

A: You’re reading this, aren’t you? I have to believe technical solutions are going to help at least mitigate the effects of climate change, but what are we going to do about over-fishing, pollution and so on? Without changing behaviours we’re not going to fix any core problems. Small pieces, loosely joined, can add up to major impacts (just look at Google’s Adwords revenues). We need a combination of both top down and bottom up approaches to achieve anything- think CFCs and dolphin friendly tuna (now we just need to work out how to catch tuna friendly tuna.)

Q: There is a lot of money in green data centers and technology, isn’t there?

A: There will be – investment is pouring in. That is not the reason for being GreenMonk though – on the contrary projects so far have been voluntary. Ask Mark from MDB if contributions have helped him so far. GreenMonk will also shortly begin working with another non-profit organisation to help it make better use of the web to drive attention and build community. More on that later.

Q: But are you getting paid?

A: Yes. Computerworld offered a paid syndication deal for GreenMonk Associates content. GreenMonk’s focus is likely to follow the money somewhat… (Computerworld will be expecting more green data center coverage than I ever intended, for example). I am hoping the real drivers of the agenda though will be you.

A pan-galactic eco terrorist group or some guys wondering about greener APIs?

I make no apologies for the blatant traffic whoring, but this woman is the most powerful social object (hence driver of conversations) in the known universe. 21st Century Citizen has the inside skinny on the new overuse of “eco”. “Skinny” and “barf-bag” in the same blog post- could there be a connection? What I do know is that if Paris starts espousing green causes I hope we come to praise, not bury her. Either way it will drive up our media stats, whether we’re MSM or the endiest end of a Long Long Tail.

the Art of War- indeed…

Network and community effects are always more powerful than individual efforts. Building communities around Green profiles makes a lot of sense. Treehugger here asks about whether people will be willing to put up with more intrusive but smarter metering. It seems to me that if social software teaches us anything its that people are more than willing to share information about themselves. Privacy is an incredibly complex thing and depends utterly on context and intention. makemesustainable is trying to tap into our willingness to share, to make us more sustainable.

Yesterday I wrote that at RedMonk has yet to formulate a policy to lower our carbon footprint, but I also said that tracking our travel via the DOPPLR service was one potential route to reporting on our footprint. Arguably using DOPPLR already contributes to better environmental effects- if it saves one piece of travel by allowing trips to be “batched” then we all benefit. DOPPLR already knows how far I have traveled this year- about 36,421k miles.

What is declarative living? Its the willingness to share. It will likely be a huge benefit for greener living. DOPPLR at first glance looks like a service for traveling more, but with the right tools in place we can travel less. Which is nice- with any luck we can all spend more time at home with those we love.

That’s my new name for Yet Another Carbon Calculator.

Great discussion about offset calculators on an earlier post…

Global Action Plan looks to be a very interesting organisation, predicated as it is on grassroots and behavioural change. According to Kable, GAP is currently doing some very interesting research which will be shortly published under the name The Inefficient Truth – what happens, for example, when government mandates force inefficiencies (what will be the environment impact of national ID card infrastructure, for example?). GAP looks really interesting but if its serious about fostering a conversation it needs to start using some social software tools- a blog would be a good first start. I would be willing to help the organisation on the front, voluntarily.