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How many countries does it take to change a light bulb?

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Light bulb

Photo credit _Beat_???

Well, the EU thinks it takes 27 countries to change the light bulb. And they may well be right.

Today the EU brings into force a ban on frosted and incandescant lightbulbs of 100W and over. This is the first part of a program to completely phase out incandescent light bulbs in the EU by 2012. According to the EU announcement, as a result of this

EU citizens will save close to 40 TWh (roughly the electrictity consumption of Romania, or of 11 million European households, or the equivalent of the yearly output of 10 power stations of 500 megawatts) and will lead to a reduction of about 15 million tons of CO2 emission per year.

However, this message doesn’t appear to be getting through to many of the EU citizens with many reports of people hoarding 100W lightbulbs across Europe.

Recycling CFL Lightbulbs

Recycling CFL Lightbulbs

Reasons for the hoarding are understandable. The light quality from CFL’s is not comparable to incandescents. CFLs lights are not dimmable. They are more expensive (at least as an initial outlay) and they need to be disposed of carefully as they contain small amounts of mercury. Fortunately our local Hipercor store has a special collection point for safe disposition and recycling of CFL’s. If your shop doesn’t, ask them why not!

However, on the positive side, what this ban does is it creates a large market of consumers (EU population is approx 500m people) hungry for good lighting solutions. This should act as a serious spur for innovation in the lighting space. The current alternatives to incandescent lights are CFL’s, Halogen lights and LEDs.

Of these, the CFLs have the limitations outlined above. Halogen bulbs have light quality equivalent to incandescents but they are not very energy efficient, saving at best 25-50% over incandescents (as compared to CFLs saving typically 75%) while still being expensive and LEDs are still quite an immature technology.

The LED light though holds the most promise. LEDs are mercury free, they are fully dimmable, their lifetime can be 50,000 to 60,000 hours (or about 10 times longer than an average CFL), there is no bulb or filament to break and they are extremely energy efficient. There are some barriers to their widespread adoption currently (they are expensive to produce and LEDs are quite directional) but the sudden appearance of a marketplace of 500m people will definitely act as an incentive to invest in overcoming these difficulties.

Thanks in no small part to today’s ban, in a few short years I expect we will all be using LEDs to light our homes and reducing our carbon footprint considerably in the process.

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Energy efficiency in the Enterprise – Chris O’Connor’s Pulse keynote

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Chris O’Connor is vice president of Strategy and Market Management for the Tivoli brand within IBM Software Group.

Chris gave a spectacular demo/presentation at Pulse 2009 on energy efficiency in the enterprise.

What set this presentation apart is that Chris gave some great stats (in 2007 data centers consumed 183bn kWh of energy, this cost $15.9bn, and 75% of enterprises have initiatives to reduce energy consumption).

Chris also demo’d some of the hugely effective ways that getting solid realtime metrics around energy utilisation in the enterprise helps reduce consumption, and finally at around 13:45 in the video, Chris tells a fascinating story about how their data center in Austin Texas was suffering from power spikes at 1am every morning, how they identified the cause and solved it.

IBM were good enough to give us a copy of his presentation for posting here.

[Disclosure – IBM paid my travel and expenses to attend Pulse]

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Fujitsu Siemens and the Zero Watt PC!

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Fujitsu Siemens announced their 0 Watt (as in zero Watt) PC at CeBit this week.

I asked Fujitsu Siemens’ Green IT Coordinator and Spokesman, Dr Bernd Kosch to come on the show to talk to us about the thinking behind this announcement and he very generously agreed!

Of course the PC does consume more than 0 Watts when operational, however, the clever bit is that unlike standard PCs which consume anywhere from 1 Watt to 5 Watts and up when in standby, the new Fujitsu consumes 0 Watts in standby!

Combine this with one of Fujistu Siemens’ 0 Watt monitors (also 0 Watts in standby), roll out policies which put all PCs into standby after hours and you drastically reduce your energy footprint (many office computers are used no more than 8 hours a day and not at all at weekends)!

The bad news? The computers won’t be available to buy until this summer.

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Reducing printers’ energy/ carbon footprint – Tivoli’s David Bartlett & Ricoh’s Mark Minshull

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Tivoli and Ricoh had a stand at Pulse 2009 where they were showing how it is possible to reduce a company’s carbon footprint by actively measuring and managing printer usage across organisations, through software!

I asked the guys there to talk me through the process and to give a demo to camera.

Oh, and there was free beer at the conference, hence the bottle in my hand!!!

[Disclosure – IBM paid my travel and expenses to attend Pulse 2009]

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Sustainability & the role of IT – Rich Lechner’s Energy & Efficiency Keynote at Pulse 2009

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Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP for Energy and Environment. He gave this presentation at the Pulse 2009 conference last week. I thought it was so good I asked him for a copy to put up on SlideShare – he very graciously agreed, so here it is.

There were some amazing statistics in the talk. Here are just a few of the highlights for me from the deck –

Slide 8:

In 2001, there were 60 million transistors for every human on the planet… by 2010 there will be 1 billion transistors per human. In 2005 there were 1.3 billion RFID tags in circulation…… by 2010 there will be 30 billion

Slide 10:

Our personal information footprints will grow 16 times between now and 2020

Slide 13:

an estimated 170 billion kilowatts are wasted by consumers each year due to insufficient power usage information

Slide 15:

Forty-five percent of traffic on the busiest New York City streets is circling the block looking for parking …congested roadways cost $78 billion annually in the form of 4.2 billion wasted hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted gas

Slide 17:

U.S. CPG companies and retailers lose $40 billion annually due to inefficient supply chains

and Slide 19:

In the U.S., a typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles, a potato 1,200 miles, a beef roast 600 miles …grocers and consumers throw away $48 billion worth of food every year

Slide 21:

Industry accounts for about 22% of freshwater usage today …the combined direct consumption of five food and beverage giants in 2007 was enough to serve the daily basic water needs of everyone on the planet

and Slide 42:

42% of IBM’s employees do not regularly come into an office saving $100M annually in real estate costs
Last year IBM saved $97M in travel costs by using online collaboration
Process improvements in the chip making process in Burlington, VT are saving 20M gallons of water, 15 thousand gallons of chemicals and over 1.5M kilowatts of electricity annually….achieving $3M in annual savings and increasing manufacturing production over 30%

What part of the presentation did you find most interesting?

[Disclosure – IBM paid my travel and expenses to attend Pulse 2009]

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Sun’s Mark Monroe on energy efficient data centers

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Sun made an announcement the other day about the opening of its new Broomfield data center.

It sounded like they had done a superb job so I asked Sun’s Director of Sustainable Computing, Mark Monroe to come on and tell us a little more about the project.

Some of the highlights of Sun’s announcement were:

  • Greater space efficiency: A scalable, modular datacenter based on the Sun Pod Architecture led to a 66 percent footprint compression, by reducing 496,000 square feet from the former StorageTek campus in Louisville, Colo. to 126,000 square feet;
  • Reduced electrical consumption: By 1 million kWh per month, enough to power 1,000 homes in Colorado;
  • Reduced raised floor datacenter space: From 165,000 square feet to less than 700 square feet of raised floor datacenter space, representing a $4M cost avoidance;
  • Greener, cleaner architecture: Including flywheel UPS that eliminates lead and chemical waste by removing the need for batteries, and a non-chemical water treatment system, saving water and reducing chemical pollution;
  • Enhanced scalability: Incorporated 7 MW of capacity that scales up to 40 percent higher without major construction;
    Innovative cooling: The world’s first and largest installation of Liebert advanced XD cooling system with dynamic cooling controls capable of supporting rack loads up to 30kW and a chiller system 24 percent more efficient than ASHRAE standards;
  • Overall excellence: Recognized with two Ace awards for Project of the Year from the Associated Contractors of Colorado, presented for excellence in design, execution, complexity and environmental application.
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Cisco EnergyWise – turns networks into an Energy Efficiency platforms

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As mentioned previously, buildings account for 38% of CO2 emissions in the United States, buildings consume 70% of the electricity load in the U.S and CO2 emissions from buildings are projected to grow faster than any other sector over the next 25 years.

Cisco has decided to tackle this problem, by turning its networking infrastructure kit into a platform for energy efficiency with its launch yesterday of Cisco EnergyWise!

Cisco EnergyWise is a technology for their Catalyst line of Switches which will be rolled out as a free software upgrade for existing switches and included in new Catalyst switches beginning in February 2009.

From the release:

Cisco EnergyWise will roll out in three phases to improve IT and building system energy utilization:

  • · In the first phase (February 2009), Network Control, Cisco EnergyWise will be supported on Catalyst switches and manage the energy consumption of IP devices such as phones, video surveillance cameras and wireless access points.
  • · In the next phase (Summer 2009), IT Control, there will be expanded industry support of EnergyWise on devices such as personal computers (PCs), laptops and printers.
  • · In the final phase (Early 2010), Building Control, Cisco EnergyWise will be extended to the management of building system assets such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), elevators, lights, employee badge access systems, fire alarm systems and security systems

EnergyWise will allow companies to create event-based policies for energy reduction (i.e. turn off all lights in data center or hotel room unless someone swipes in – and turn off when they swipe out). It will also allow for control of the energy utilisation of everything from wireless access points, right the way up to building’s aircon systems. Policies can be grouped by tags, so you can control entire buildings campuses or geographies.

Cisco also announced the acquisition of Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence Inc. to get access to the intelligent middleware to provide interoperability and integration between building infrastructure, IT applications and Cisco EnergyWise.

EnergyWise will also enable companies to report aggregated power consumption across an organisation, provide reports of current power conditions and suggests potential changes thereby reducing energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

Demand response programs will benefit hugely from systems like this being in place.

Superb to see RedMonk client company SolarWinds being signed up as the first network management partner for the program. SolarWinds told me they hope to have the integration with Cisco EnergyWise complete in 2009 and they told me that:

  • · EnergyWise policies and configurations will be managed by Orion Network Configuration Manager (NCM).
  • · Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) will show EnergyWise statistics and reports in its familiar web-based dashboard.
  • · We will also establish EnergyWise forums in thwack, to help support users as they roll out EnergyWise in their corporate environments.

Now, how long will it be before Juniper come out with a competitive offering, do you think? The more companies thinking this way and turning out products like this, the better for everyone.

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Mark Monroe, Sun’s Director of Sustainable Computing talks Green!

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Mark Monroe is Sun Microsystems‘ Director of Sustainable Computing. I had a chat with him the other day about Sun’s thinking around Green IT.

We discussed Sun’s new Santa Clara data center, their pod architecture and their Project Black Box among other things!

Mark had some interesting numbers to share, including the fact that in their Santa Clara data center, they reduced the size of the data center from 202,000 square feet to 76,000 square feet and the number of racks was dropped from 550 to 65 while reducing thier power requirement and increasing the compute capacity!

Towards the end Mark referred to two links on the sun site for further information, they were sun.com/blueprints and sun.com/ecoinnovations.

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Living In De-material World: On Microsoft and Bit Miles

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I have written a fair bit here about Bit Miles (the moral imperative to digitise) and business process dematerialisation, so I was particularly interested in a recent trip to Microsoft’s gaming and world simulation division.

What was so relevant?

One area that I believe holds out great promise for this kind of simulation technology is in sustainable and sustainability modeling. Take the pilot training example above; while the highest cost may be for maintenance engineers, but how much fuel is being needlessly burned? Training in the real world is expensive. Moving Atoms has a cost. I have recently started talking about Bit Miles as a Greenmonk narrative, defined as is the carbon cost associated with moving a good or creating a service that could instead have been delivered digitally. Bit Miles offer us a moral imperative to digitize: a simulation of the world is a beautiful opportunity to rethink and potentially dematerialize business processes.

Why not Supply Chain Simulator ™, which would pull together all of your plant information (pulled in from OSI, say), where your people are located (Peoplesoft), and how you move goods and services (SAP) around the world? An organisation could begin to run really deep “What If” scenarios about the energy costs of their businesses with simulations like these. But what would really make these models sing is the fact they’d be visual and immersive. Telling is rarely as effective as Showing. What would a low energy manufacturing business look like? With virtual technology we could maybe work it out. At this point it might seem that I have gone off the deep end, but the ESP team inspires that in you. I didn’t see a single Powerpoint slide during my visit. Rather Shawn likes to open up people’s imaginations.

I would love to know your thoughts- there is a good discussion going on over at my monkchips blog.

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Supercomputers can be Green – who knew?

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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!).