Tag Archive for 'energy efficiency'

Any questions for Strato Director Rene Wienholtz?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on September 16, 2008
in podcast questions
. 2 Comments

Sevici
Photo Credit Rock Alien

Despite being Europe’s second largest hosting company, Strato are also carbon neutral!

They didn’t achieve this by purchasing offsets either. Strato did it by:
1) purchasing energy efficient hardware
2) using very precise cooling methodologies
3) using customised software to run its facilities and finally
4) by buying CO2 free energy from NaturEnergie.

Strato’s Executive Director for Information Technology and Innovation is Rene Wienholtz and I will be chatting to him tomorrow morning asking him how a hosting company, typically a massive power sink, can go carbon neutral.

If you have any questions you’d like me to put to Rene in the podcast, either leave them in a comment on this post, or email them to me (tom@redmonk.com).

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How Dell and HP could learn from each other

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on August 20, 2008
in transportation
. 2 Comments

Transport fumes
Photo Credit aplumb

I received a press release from HP the other day informing me that HP have

qualified all business PC, printing and server products shipped throughout the United States and Canada for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) SmartWay logo labeling program

Perhaps the SmartWay program is well known within the United States but I hadn’t heard of it before so I went to the SmartWay site to have a look.

From the site’s basic information page:

The SmartWay brand identifies products and services that reduce transportation-related emissions. However, the impact of the brand is much greater as the SmartWay brand signifies a partnership among government, business and consumers to protect our environment, reduce fuel consumption, and improve our air quality for future generations.

The site links to the EPS’a Green Vehicle Guide which allows you to compare the fuel efficiency across hundreds of different car models.

However the real meat is in the Smartway Transport section of the site. This is a

collaboration between EPA and the freight sector designed to improve energy efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions, and improve energy security

So responsible haulage companies can join the Smartway program and get help in becoming more efficient and Smartway certified (joining Smartway is free). Smartway certification then means that as well as reducing costs, responsible shipping companies will pick up extra business from companies like HP who are looking to have a greener supply chain.

However, if HP really wanted to show its commitment to Green they could announce their intention to become a carbon neutral company, as Dell has done.

On the other hand, Dell could take a leaf from HP’s book and also receive approval from the EPA to have the SmartWay logo displayed on its product packaging for the compliance of its shipping network. You are only as Green as your supply chain after all!

[Disclosure - Dell are a GreenMonk client company]

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Why can’t we have energy labels for all electronic devices?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on August 19, 2008
in Standards
. 4 Comments

Energy rating

I moved to Spain recently. Setting up a new home in a new country meant a lot of new purchases. I bought CFL (and some LCD) bulbs for lighting. That was easy.

However, when it came to other purchases, things were far from clear.

I wanted a Blu-Ray DVD player and a decent TV but how do I get information on the energy efficiency of these devices to compare them?

The Sony BDP-S300 Blu-Ray DVD player product page has no information whatsoever on the power requirements of the device (and that is one of the only reasonably good Blu-Ray players easily available here, for now).

Similarly with the TV. I know plasma screens use far more energy than LCD so I wanted an LCD but there is no site which allows you to compare the energy usage of different TVs (or DVD players, or computers, or printers or…) in the same way that the ActOnCO2 site does for cars, for instance.

What I really want though, and I suspect I am not alone in this, is clear certified energy labels on all electrical items, similar to the ones on the light bulb packaging above.

We already have energy labels for most white goods, light bulb packaging and cars in the EU, it should be possible to extend this to cover all electrical products. I understand that it is not straightforward but it would be incredibly useful for consumers and would reward responsible manufacturers.

So, why can’t we have standardised, energy labels for all electronic devices?

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Dell claims carbon neutrality 5 months ahead of schedule

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on August 13, 2008
in carbon neutral
. 1 Comment

In June of this year, Dell re-asserted its aim of becoming the Greenest Technology company on the planet with a post which included nuggets like:

  1. recycled 102 million pounds of IT equipment from customers during 2007, a 20 percent increase over 2006
  2. became the first major computer manufacturer to offer desktop customers Silver 80 PLUS-certified power supplies
  3. the company’s laptops and desktops, already among the industry’s most energy-efficient, are being designed to consume up to 25 percent less energy by 2010 relative to systems offered today and
  4. The company’s carbon intensity (CO2 emissions/revenue) is among the lowest of the Fortune 50 and less than half that of its closest competitor

Then just last week Dell announced that it had met its aim of becoming a carbon neutral company five months ahead of schedule. It did so using a combination of “an aggressive program to improve efficiencies in the company, purchasing green energy directly as well as renewable energy credits and verified emissions reductions” according to Dane Parker, Dell’s Director of Environment, Health, & Safety.

Some have sounded a note of skepticism saying things like:

You have to question whether they have taken all their workers’ commuting into consideration, and the materials (involved) in making a computer, going all the way back to zinc mining

and

Carbon neutrality is a large amount of greenwash. Computer companies should be focusing on the developments made in recent years in the reduction of harmful material inside the computers, and reduction in the power that computers use. With these high claims, companies are setting themselves up to be knocked back down again

And while there is some validity to this, in fairness to Dell, they have implemented a policy that requires their suppliers to report their emissions during quarterly business reviews, so they are pushing this back down the supply chain and it is hard to argue with the fact that Dell’s carbon intensity (CO2 emissions/revenue) is less than half that of its closest competitor.

We need to see a lot more companies following Dell’s lead in this. Having said that, independent verification of the carbon neutral claim by a trusted third party would do away with any lingering doubts about Dell’s commitment to Green once and for all.

[Disclosure - Dell are a GreenMonk client]

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Supercomputers can be Green - who knew?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 30, 2008
in energy efficiency
. 0 Comments

ibm supercomputer
Photo Credit gimpbully

According to Wikipedia most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.

The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, for example, is a cluster of 3240 computers, each with 40 processing cores while NASA’s Columbia is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors.

If servers and data centers are considered the bad boys of the IT energy world, then supercomputers must be raving psychopaths, right? Well, not necessarily.

The findings of the Green500 List, an independent ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, show that this is far from the case. In fact in their June 2008 listings they report that:

The first sustained petaflop supercomputer – Roadrunner, from DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory – exhibits extraordinary energy efficiency.

Roadrunner, the top-ranked supercomputer in the TOP500, is ranked #3 on the Green500 List. This achievement further reinforces the fact that energy efficiency is as important as raw performance for modern supercomputers and that energy efficiency and performance can coexist.

Other interesting findings from the list are:

  1. The top three supercomputers surpass the 400 MFLOPS/watt milestone for the first time.
  2. Energy efficiency hits the mainstream - The energy efficiency of a commodity system based on Intel’s 45-nm low-power quad-core Xeon is now on par with IBM BlueGene/L (BG/L) machines, which debuted in November 2004 and
  3. Each of supercomputers in the top ten from this edition of the Green500 List has a higher FLOPS/watt rating than the previous #1 Green500 supercomputer (the previous list was 4 months ago in February)

IBM come out of this list as Big Green - out of the first 40 ranked systems, 39 are IBM-based. That is an incredible committment to Green which can’t be argued with and for which IBM deserves due credit.

And speaking of Green, it is great to see a supercomputer based in Ireland, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing’s Schrödinger supercomputer, coming in joint 4th place on the list of Green computers.

What makes this even more interesting is that many supercomputers are used in climate modelling and for research into Global Warming.

It is counterintuitive that supercomputers would be highly energy-efficient but it is precisely because they consume so much power that a lot of research is going into reducing supercomputers’ power requirements, thereby cutting their running costs. Once again a case of the convergence of ecology and economics (or green and greenbacks!).

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Supply chain management and carbon accounting

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 25, 2008
in carbon accounting
. 1 Comment

Supply chain
Photo Credit phitar

I came across two fascinating surveys of supply chain execs attitudes to climate change today!

The first from environmentalleader.com says that:

The survey of over 500 North American supply chain executives shows that the vast majority of respondents, 90 percent, think that over the next three years green issues will remain or become more important to their transport and logistics processes…

This push towards green is reported to be driven by a number of factors, including financial ROI (61%), public relations payback (78%), improved customer relations (83%), decreased fuel bills
(70%), and improved supply chain efficiency (59%)….

The results revealed that 72 percent are or are planning to improve energy efficiency, 37 percent are redesigning warehousing and distribution center networks, and a dramatic 60 percent are measuring and/or reducing emissions.

Amidst the slew of supply chain carbon measurement tools and technologies that have come onto the market in the last year, only a handful of respondents are already using an external measurement tool. But while 16% have deployed an internal system for this purpose, another 30% are currently researching which software to use or purchase in the short term.

30% are researching software for measuring supply chain carbon footprint? I smell opportunity!!!

The other survey I came across came from McKinsey. The report is a survey of 2,000 global executives.

According to the McKinsey report:

for consumer goods makers, high-tech players, and other manufacturers, between 40 and 60 percent of a company’s carbon footprint resides upstream in its supply chain—from raw materials, transport, and packaging to the energy consumed in manufacturing processes. For retailers, the figure can be 80 percent…

Surprisingly perhaps, we find that many of the opportunities to reduce emissions carry no net life-cycle costs—the upfront investment more than pays for itself through lower energy or material usage. Others, however, will require tradeoffs between emissions and profitability, in areas such as logistics and product design (including product specification and functionality). Forward-looking companies are using such discussions as opportunities for supplier development, for example by transferring best practices in manufacturing, purchasing, and R&D—as well as energy efficiency—to key suppliers. This opens the possibility of still lower costs and improved operational performance, in addition to helping suppliers remove more carbon from their supply chains.

Reading between the lines there are a few important messages here:

  1. Good carbon accounting software is becoming more and more of a requirement
  2. Attacking energy efficiency aggressively can significantly reduce a company’s carbon footprint
  3. Companies are increasingly looking at reducing supplier’s carbon footprints as a means to reduce their own. This can be either through working with suppliers or by choosing suppliers based on their carbon footprints.
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