Green IT refers to the
environmentally sustainable computing or IT. According to one definition Green
IT is “an organization’s ability to systematically apply environmental sustainability
criteria to the design, production, sourcing, use and disposal of the IT technical
infrastructure as well as within the human and managerial components of the existing
IT infrastructure”. Another definition says Green IT is “the study and practice
of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and
associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and
networking and communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal
or no impact on the environment”. All definitions of Green IT talk about the
environment friendly ways of doing business. At one side we need resources for
productive work and on the other side we need to dispose the waste generated in
the process. The colour green reminds us the colour of nature, this Green IT concept gives
ideas about IT can help in reducing carbon emission and effective use of
energy. In the coming paragraphs, we discuss more on this.
It is widely assumed that a typical
computer uses about .65 kilowatts per hour (kWh) in use, or .35kWh (stand-by)
and .03kWh in hibernate mode. Assuming that the computer spends 220 working
days with 12 hours in operational mode (1716kW) and 12 hours in standby mode
(924kW), and spends 24 hours in hibernate mode for the remaining 145 days
(104kW), it will consume 2145 kW of electricity. According to UK government figures,
1kWh produces 0.51kg of carbon dioxide (CO2), and 1,960kWh produces 1 tonne of
CO2. This makes allowance for the fact that with current nuclear capacity
(which is reducing) some 15% of electricity is generated without producing any
CO2. This means that a single PC in office mode costs an insignificant amount to
run (£16.00 per annum), but generates 1.094 tonnes of CO2 per annum equivalent
to the CO2 produced by a single passenger flying from London to Cairo – spread
this across a distributed desktop environment of 2,000 PCs and you have an
annual carbon footprint of 2,188 tonnes of CO2.
The above given description may
give us a feel that IT industry is one of the major cause of global carbon
emission but according to Gartner Research the contribution of IT industry is
2% of total carbon emission which is equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by
aviation industry. What about the rest 98%? The good side of this is IT can do
a lot regarding this. There are substantial inefficiencies in the technology and
use behaviors that can be readily addressed and IT can significantly contribute
to control and reduce the 98% of CO2 emissions caused by other activities and industries.
In order to understand the Green IT
prospects of a company, we can do G readiness analysis. G readiness analysis
consists of five dimensions: attitude, policy, practice, governance and
technology. Awareness and concern of IT people regarding the climate change due
IT artifacts and operations is represented by attitude dimension. It can be
reflected in the IT organizations
concern to improve the energy efficiency in managing the IT technical infrastructure,
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste. Green IT Policy encompasses the
frameworks an organization has developed and put in place to apply
environmental sustainability criteria throughout its value chain including IT
sourcing, IT operations and services and IT end-of-life management. Green IT
Practice refers to what extent an IT organization has translated its Green IT concerns
and policies into actions along the IT activity value chain. Green IT
Technology reflects the extent to which the IT organization acquires and builds
a more environmentally effective IT infrastructure. Green IT Governance is the
operating model that defines the administration of Green IT initiatives and is
closely related to the policy dimension. These five dimensions help the
organization to improve its performance a Green IT company.
The NASSCOM Green IT initiative is
holistic and focuses on the following areas:
- Make IT Green: Adoption by industry of green technologies and practices including green buildings, green computing infrastructure (energy efficient data centers, power efficient computers etc.) sharing infrastructure (shared data centres etc) and addressing issues like e-waste management.
- Make Green Happen Through IT: Deploy IT solutions which help firms & businesses become green including like cloud computing, video-conferencing, intelligent transport systems, web-conferencing, motion and heat detection sensors among others.
- Make Green Warriors: Encourage the over 2 million employees of the IT-BPO industry to adopt a Green life-style and thereby become change agents to create a sustainable impact in the society around themselves through increasing awareness and more importantly changing behaviors.
Various models are available to assess the Green IT
aspects of the IT organizations. Various certifications like ‘energy star’ are
available to encourage the Green IT concept. For a better future and for a better environment,
we have to practice green. We need to
work on the unnecessary power consumption practices we have. We can address so
many things by a just behaviour change. In order to reduce the waste, the
companies should work on the life span of the products. Various approaches that
an IT organization can follow include product longevity, software and
deployment optimisation, power management, material recycling and
telecommuting.
Product longevity refers the making of products with
bigger ecological footprint which means longer life cycle. This will reduce the
e-waste and thus contribute towards the Green IT movement. Software and
deployment optimization refers the best optimized practices in software making
which will reduce the usage of the hardware resources and that will help to
keep the globe green. Areas to be taken care in this regard include algorithmic
efficiency, optimized resource allocation, more virtualization and effective
and efficient use of terminal servers. The power management aspects look into
the reduction in power consumption by the IT systems in the world. In power management, we concentrate on reducing
power consumption at data centres. Cloud computing has a good role here. Another
area that we concentrate is the operating system support in reducing power
consumption, this can be done by providing option like sleep mode, hibernate
etc. We already have such options, but we need to fine tune the power control
options of operating system. Power supplies are another area where the
companies can concentrate. We can use switched mode power supplies instead of
LDO based ones which consumes more power for the voltage conversions in the
PCB. Storage video card and display are some more areas where we can improve the
power consumption. By using the latest technologies for storage and display, we
can drastically reduce the power consumption.
