GreenMonk: the blog

Great blog post today from Tom Raftery: Carbon accounting software – a huge opportunity? Seems like I am not the only one that thinks green tape is going to be a major issue. One way to calculate Bit Miles is with carbon accounting software, and you can be sure we’re going to see Carbon Added tax. Taxes aside, carbon trading is set to be a big deal. And how can we manage what we can’t measure, if we want to move towards carbon neutrality?

The post is based on a ComputerWorld story, which is based on some new research from S2 Intelligence (a firm I am sure we’ll hear a lot more from).

S2’s managing director, Dr Bruce McCabe, said

to reduce the carbon footprint of businesses we first need to measure it, but green accounting today is shallow, with lots of window dressing and little actual measurement… Even services companies will see all their offices progressively instrumented to capture carbon footprint data

Government regulation–via carbon markets and taxation-will be matched by customer and trading partner demands for detailed reporting.

Carbon labelling in supermarkets is a good example. Led by chains such as Tesco in the UK, this will soon impact what makes it into the shopping basket.

BT is already aggressively positioning itself for the measurement wave in this space. Indeed Tesco is a customer of the telco’s services arm. It looks like SAP and Technidata get their second mention of the day on GreenMonk: they also offer carbon accounting solutions. SAP should really buy Technidata so that it can move forward more quickly in this space. Microsoft is also likely to play aggressively in environmental monitoring. It just announced some cool sounding embedded sensors. The big 4 are all bound to be involved. Do you know of any smaller players in the space?

We’re used to dealing with red tape, but enviromental issues are going to create a mountain of green tape. Some of the legislation and regulation will be called for, some will be pointless. One regulation that SAP talked about this week at an event in Orlando really got me thinking.

First though what is this regulation?

REACH is a new European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use (EC 1907/2006). It deals with the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances. The new law entered into force on 1 June 2007.

The aim of REACH is to improve the protection of human health and the environment through the better and earlier identification of the intrinsic properties of chemical substances. At the same time, innovative capability and competitiveness of the EU chemicals industry should be enhanced. The benefits of the REACH system will come gradually, as more and more substances are phased into REACH.

Many in industry slammed the regulation when it was first mooted, but as the father of a two year old I applaud it. We need to become a lot more careful about chemical leaching into the environment, and its great to see the EU make a stand on the issue. When male songbirds start developing female voices because of pollutants its time to thinking much harder about our impacts on the environment, and what it might mean for child development. I don’t want my boy to end up sounding like Leona Lewis.

Greentape isn’t confined to the EU however. In the US the Toxic Substance Control Act (Tosca), which has far higher fines than REACH and, for example, specific local regs in countries such as Norway.

SAP currently deals with REACH registration and notification management through a partnership with a firm called Technidata. It plans integration with its global trade services and health and safety modules. Specialist consulting firms such as ReachReady and Oval Systems are also emerging. It will be a bean feast for vendors, but no less important for that. Interestingly IBM and Oracle don’t seem to be saying much on the subject. But of course SAP is stepped in European manufacturing in a way those other firms just aren’t.

If you are in manufacturing and you’re aren’t getting reach for REACH its time to get started. Green from the top down. Well done the EU.

 

 

I was really hoping this budget would be interesting from a green perspective, but alas it seems not. I haven’t had a chance to really dig in but just slapping a couple of new taxes on big cars just doesn’t cut it. Is the UK Government serious about drastically cutting carbon emissions or not? It seems it still hasn’t realised the gravity of the situation, and its frankly far too late to say anything that shows leadership about plastic bags after M&S and the Daily Mail framed the issue so clearly and began nailing the problem. Talk about bandwagon jumping.

I got some good responses from twitter when I asked about the budget’s green cred.

“Green budget my arse. Capita are the only winners with money set aside for looking at road pricing opportunities.”

@dominiccampbell

Capita is the service provider behind congestion charging, in case you were wondering.

I am all for taxation as part of a balanced effort to reduce carbon emissions, but think the government needs to offer a lot more incentives to better behaviour-such as removing sales taxes for home insulation products. Making greener energy cheaper  at retail is another missed opportunity.

Alistair Darling can’t help but look weak next to old Iron Broon, who ruled the treasury for so long but a bolder braver greener budget could have really stamped his authority on the role.  Another missed opportunity for both the country, and his reputation.

The government needs to start leading. Gas guzzlers was an easy target.

Much as I am skeptical of bold-faced claims like “Vista is green” it does appear that Steve Ballmer is talking some sense on the subject. In Computerworld coverage of CeBIT this week it was notable that rather than talking about product Ballmer talked about best practices.

“Microsoft is to release a set of best practices for administrators running datacentres that share the energy-saving strategies the vendor is applying to its own operations, promised CEO Steve Ballmer.”

A few months ago I criticised the software giant for not responding to eco-responsibility, let alone driving it, but that all seems to be changing now. A big step forward came when Microsoft assigned responsibility for sustainability planning to one guy, Rob Bernard (who I blogged about here) . Now as the Windows Server 2008 rollout really starts to drum, Microsoft is refactoring its green assets and positioning them accordingly.

Sometimes its the basics- on the PCside for example better power management does make a difference. Discouraging users from setting up screensavers, for example, could lead to surprisingly large power savings. I think that Microsoft virtualisation is going to be a huge win here.

According to Ballmer:

“If you look at non-travel power consumption in the world today… information technology is one of the most rapidly growing power consumers on the planet,” Ballmer said. “We think we have a real responsibility… to reduce power consumption by the IT industry.

Frankly its great that CeBIT chose Green as the theme of the year – it meant all of the major IT vendors had yet another reason to think about their strategies in this area.

Asus even pitched a laptop with a bamboo case. Thanks to Treehugger for this image:

As I have said before marketing green is not a sin. Outcomes are more important than justifications. When you consider how sales of organic foods have sky-rocketed its clear consumer behaviours can change, so why not in the IT arena. Some say its all hype, well that’s fine. But use of sustainable materials, and improved energy efficiency have to be good things, whatever planet you’re on.

People love to throw stones at Microsoft, but just as the company is currently demonstrating, with a flurry of substantive announcements of better interoperability with open source from a business and technical perspective, that it can change, so its green efforts should pay dividends.

I have mentioned Tom Raftery before but after visiting him and his colleagues as one of the guest speakers for the it@cork Green IT event yesterday I thought a follow up was definitely in order. Tom was responsible for redesigning the cork internet exchange to make it more efficient and took some intriguing design decisions, at least one worthy of Buckminster Fuller. It was Fuller for example who realised that we don’t need to have our showers so hot if the ambient temperature of the bathroom is a little bit warmer. Sounds obvious but then so often the really smart game-changing things do. Every time you see one of those timer/light/warmers in the ceiling of a US hotel room you are likely seeing Fuller’s thinking at work. Fuller was an iconoclast. It seems to me that in his own way so is Tom. And today more than ever we need iconoclasts at work, rethinking business as usual.

What is more, Tom is gas, as they say in Ireland (well on TV shows about Ireland, anyway. Probably about as real as the Irish tat in the airport) . It was brilliant to see the blank looks on the audience’s face as he said one of his slides was “geek porn”. About half an hour later I made the same mistake, telling the audience “unfortunately unlike Tom I have no porn in my presentation.” Cue more blank faces. Perhaps it was a bit early…

So what is so interesting about the cork internet exchange? Last time I mentioned the case study a couple of things went over my head. The most notable of which comes in slide 19 of this presentation.

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What was the design decision that makes all the difference at Cork? Well you see a normal data center has hot aisles (backs of servers) and cold aisles (fronts of servers), but the data center has an average ambient temperature based on convection and flows of these air streams. Indeed most data centers are pretty much designed and run with the ambient temperature in mind. So what did Tom and team do? They put a cork in it. They sealed the cold aisles, which means that when you walk into the data center you’re hit with a blast of 30 degree celsius air.  For humans the temperature is very high, but where it has to be cold, it is. Which is pretty smart if you ask me. Of course this idea would never fly in America where humans can only stand a very small ambient temperate range between 65 and 70 degrees F. But in Europe I can certainly see some organisations trying something similar. To be clear- the data center heat is also used to warm the offices and hot water at cix. Says Tom: “Our central heating is powered by Intel”. The crack about Americans and air-conditioning above is a little unfair- after all- Cork has the native advantage of not being as hot as California, or locations where many US data centers are located. But still- it surely makes sense to concentrate on cooling machines rather than people when you’re designing a data center.

Tom also talked some madness about electricity companies paying us to use electricity when the wind farms were working at peak load, but that’s a subject for another time.

One final thing I want to point out is that Tom is currently looking for a gig. He is world class as a social media guy, and he is also hardcore on the green data center side. If you’re looking for help look him up. He is moving to Seville soon, but location doesn’t matter with this interweb thingy.

Here are his details:

tom at tomrafteryit.net
Tel +353-21-490 8485
Mob +353-86-3840828

Quite a lot I reckon. Today comes news that UK retailer Marks and Spencer is introducing a 5p charge for plastic bags. That’s a good move – and the company already offers quite snazzy reusable bags at the check out. CEO Stuart Rose is the real thing – driving greenness into the brand by driving greenness into the company, rather than with some surface greenwash. He should be a knight already for saving the country’s favourite underwear shop, but now its got to be a shoe-in.

The BBC completely rips off yesterday’s Daily Mail with its facts on bags: “Campaigners say plastic bags damage the environment. Some 13bn are given free to UK shoppers every year, and they take an estimated 1,000 years to decay.”

Me as a defender of the Daily Mail??? Green is sure going to throw up some strange bedfellows… But back to M&S.

The bag thing is excellent, but I noticed something in my branch the other day that totally blew me away. If you take your old M&S clothes to Oxfam they will give you a 5 pound voucher to spend in M&S. Think about it. M&S evidently has. Reduce waste with very clear economic incentives. Cradle to Grave.

While major IT suppliers have introduced recycling schemes for their old kit, I haven’t seen them offer substantial rebates for doing do. Its about time they did. If you recycle you get a discount. That’s Goodness.

Check out M&S Plan A here.

The picture is Lily Cole, fair use I hope. Take some old clothes to Oxfam – buy one of those purple dresses. Surprised it goes so well with red hair, actually.

I am on the plane home from Nice, where I attended the inaugural European VMworld in nearby Cannes. It was an interesting event, and I will be saying more on my about that on my general tech blog monkchips. But I wanted to say a little bit about the ecological value of virtualisation generally and VMware specifically.

Firstly – what is virtualisation? It is simply the ability to pool computing resources so that can be accessed by many devices and services. If you can run 10 different applications on the same server for example why not do so, as long as performance is acceptable to end users…

VMware has evidently begun to market its green credentials more aggressively, and in my opinion has every right to do so.

Why? Because Green is Lean, and Lean is Green.

Running VMware on production servers for Windows-based applications can drive utilisation up from only 15% into the 90%+ mark. Not only can virtualisation help an organisation to make its existing servers run more efficiently, it can also reduce total numbers of servers by adding more flexibility into the mix. What is the difference between a QA server, a development machine, or a production box? Not much. By making it easier to provision, re-provision, and decommission servers virtualisation can reduce the need for every silo to have its own boxes. Centralising a server sprawl can help an organisation get a handle on its total energy consumption, and potentially lower cooling and energy costs through economies of scale.

There is a counter-argument that customers will simply max out what they have – efficiency gains will be “wasted” on new workloads. But that is a bit like saying recycling is a waste of time, designed to assuage middle class guilt. This is to confuse benefits with justifications.

If the only reason an organisation chooses to go down the virtualisation route is to lower costs that is fantastic. Doing so doesn’t make the efficiency gains less significant. Cutting costs and going green go hand in hand. If there is a single narrative frame that sums up just that just how addicted to abundance and waste we have become its its the idea that companies and nations can’t invest in using energy more efficiently because it will make them less competitive.  The current US administration bought and sold this line hook line and sinker. Oil is at $100 a barrel and we’re arguing that investing in more efficient power use will harm the economy.  You can’t make this stuff up.

While data centers may only account for 3% of worldwide energy consumption we should still try and drive the figure down. Of course demand is going to massively increase – as we move away from carbon miles to bit miles, where content that can be digitised is digitised – but that is all the more reason to become more efficient. The demand for IT may be infinite, but the resources to run our systems are not.

At the risk of dorking out even more I was also intrigued by another VMware technology, called “thin provisioning” – which rather than storing a desktop image for each machine, stores the differences between them. This “linked clone” technology reduces storage requirements by a 10:1 ratio.

Its not only VMware that offers virtualisation. The IBM mainframe is the most efficient computing device ever built for data intensive workloads, largely because its a virtualised platform. Unix server vendors now offer far more efficient servers than they used to – virtualisation is key. Microsoft is now muscling in on VMware’s market, which is brilliant news- the two competing should make servers and PCs even more efficient. Dell, HP and IBM are all now going to ship servers pre-installed with VMware’s software.

I heard a few nice examples at VMworld. Thus Aspen, the reinsurance company, is currently rolling out thin clients, more like old school mainframe terminals but with rich media capabilities, to its end-users. Aspen calculates, in conjunction with their consulting partner BSG, that the average Windows PC consumes about 150 Watts of power. The new thin clients- nearer 8. Watts not to like? Aspen is even considering rolling out these thin clients to its users at home.

VMware CEO Diane Green (nice name in the context, eh!) put forward a few nice examples in her keynote- including projects at the World Wildlife Fund and Sheffield Hallam University. Competitors may complain this is just green-washing, but in this context its absolutely appropriate.

Efficiency is green- we should praise efficiency, not bury it. The reasons don’t matter- but the results do. I spoke to someone this morning who said customers don’t really care about green, but just wanted to know how many dollars they would save in deploying virtualisation technology, and therefore tech companies shouldn’t talk about eco issues. I think this misunderestimates some important dynamics. Few customers are going to choose a technology just because its labelled green, its true, but some might well be put off by a supplier arguing that green issues don’t matter.

If green IT is a fad I am going to celebrate it while it lasts. VMware has already done a lot for the environment, just by helping us make Windows servers more efficient, whether or not it markets the fact. Thanks Diane and Mendel!

disclosure: VMware, Dell and HP are not clients. IBM and Microsoft are. VMware paid for my travel and expenses to Nice.

Asks Miss Rogue. Its a great question – not that they aren’t out there, I just don’t have names at my fingertips. If you know of any budding Anita Roddicks out there please let me know.

Google came up with one impressive example straight away, from Kate Craig-Wood, a Surrey-based entrepreneur who is evidently on a mission.

Business: I want to transform the Internet hosting & IT infrastructure sector. My current objective is to be instrumental in making available high-quality, universally-accessible, eco-friendly utility computing facilities in the UK and to help establish Britain as the world-leader in the next stage of ICT’s evolution.

Environment: I am passionate about environmental issues, particularly in relation to reducing the IT sector’s contribution to the greenhouse effect. I am a member of Intellect UK’s directorial leadership group on energy & efficiency, and also a committee member of the the British Computer Society’s (BCS) Data Centre Specialist Group (DCSG), and am working to bridge their and Intellect’s expertise in the area of green computing. As well as writing about green IT, I am often quoted on the subject and occasionally present on the topic, including a recent webinar – The Business Case and Methods for the Green Data Centre. My company was also the first ISP in the UK to become CarbonNeutral.

Women in IT: There are a number of issues facing women in IT; only 16% of tech workers are female, falling from a high of about 21% five years ago. On top of that, at 23% the gender pay gap in the IT sector is much worse the UK’s 17% average. As one of the few female entrepreneurs in the IT sector I hope to act as a role model, challenge the inequalities and misconceptions in our industry, and encourage other women to move into ICT (where they are badly needed!).

Kate’s blog is here. Subscribed!

Another interesting pointer from Google is the upcoming International Women Environmental Entrepreneurs Fair, which will piggyback on the IV World Conservation Congress (5-14 October, 2008, in Barcelona, Spain).

The Fair will also allow form the basis of a worldwide network of women green entrepreneurs, which will catalyze collaborations among different sectors, associations, regions and countries. The International Women Environmental Entrepreneur Fair aims to: facilitate and strengthen women’s productive enterprises that produce or provide services that are environmentally friendly; and showcase women’s professional and business activities that go beyond regional borders and contribute to environmental conservation and the alleviation of poverty.

One final, local thought: I nominate Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino aka designswarm, who is helping to build momentum behind Arduino. What’s green about hardware hacking? When you talk to Alex it becomes clear that hackable is sustainable. If you can hack it you can fix it, mend it, improve it, reuse it. Hacking can be akin to recycling. Its often pointed out that in Africa people are a lot more creative about reusing stuff. We should support such efforts at source. Resourcefulness springs from a lack of resources, not an abundance. It shouldn’t just be be people in poorer countries that sweat assets rather than throw them away though.

If you know any women ecopreneurs please let me know or contact Tara directly.

Above Image courtesy of the United Reform Church, from the Swords Into Ploughshares exhibition ofMozambique Art.

Pineapple is the background image from Miss Rogue’s twitter homepage.

Should you consider your impact on the environment when you’re rushing home this evening, hoping to gain a few late brownie points? Grumpy Old Man asks the question.

A bouquet of roses has an ecological footprint of 20 m² which is the same as driving a car for 20 km. On top of that a lot of fertilizers and herbicides are used. Even cultivating the flowers in e.g. Kenya and transporting them to e.g. Belgium will have a lower footprint.

But the associations involved in looking at the issue ask yout not to boycott flowers since the life and working conditions developing countries are at stake. Instead:

• buy flowers which last longer. Perfect examples are amaryllis, chrysant and the flamingo flower. Narcissus, iris and tulips don’t last that long
• flowering plants or bulbs in a pot are a perfect alternative
• one or a couple of flowers can be as nice as a huge bouquet
• go for Happy Flowers. These are:
  • flowers with a fair trade label (in Belgium Max Havelaar roses)
  • organic seasonal flowers from the organic shop
  • local produce with labels like Flower Label Program (FLP) (in German speaking countries only) and Fair Flowers and Plants (FFP).

photo courtesy of peasap.