Environmental Impacts-Global Warming and Climate Change
Are Google and other leading tech companies serious about addressing energy use, or is the new Climate Savers Computing Initiative a bit of greenwash?
By Lisa Roner, North America Editor
Google and Intel, a veritable who’s who of the computing world including Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP and Lenovo, plus power company Pacific Gas and Electric, the US Environmental Protection agency and more than 25 environmental groups, companies and universities have joined together to form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.The group says it collectively aims to save $5.5 billion in energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tonnes per year by making computer power supplies 90% efficient by 2010.
Its targets will exceed the US government’s new Energy Star standard requiring power supplies be at least 80% efficient.
This seemingly noble effort, heartily endorsed by the group’s NGO partner WWF. The move promises to reduce the carbon footprint of the whole industry globally. The average desktop PC currently wastes nearly half of the power it consumes as excess heat and the average server wastes one third.
Public interest
At the same time, Google and its friends in the electricity-hungry computing industry stand to gain some green points with a once napping, but suddenly overwrought-with-guilt-over-climate-change, American public.
The industry that the computing initiative represents accounts for 2% of all global carbon dioxide emissions, with PCs responsible for about 40% of that.
“More advanced computers need extra power to operate”
CSCI’s proposed $5.5 billion saving in energy costs and 54 million tonnes a year in greenhouse gases would (by the group’s own calculations) be equal to removing more than 11 million cars from the road or shutting down twenty 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants. In all, no small climate change-muzzling feat.
The new 90% efficiency standards would cut the average PC power consumption worldwide by half by 2010.
There are clear economic drivers for this move, industry experts argue. IT columnist Eric Lundquist says the initiative “aims to correct a host of legacy PC design choices, that while good at boosting computing power, were boneheaded in wasting electrical power”.
Power means consumption
But now more advanced computers need extra power to operate and the energy costs are catching up with big companies like Google.
As data storage demands and processing power have increased, Lundquist says, so too has the power consumption of computing.
US technology research firm Gartner predicts that new, more powerful computers and servers use between three and four times the power of traditional servers and generate more heat that must be dissipated. Energy costs could easily balloon to 50% of a company’s IT budget over the next few years, compared to about 10% currently.
Google declines to reveal the levels of its own energy consumption, saying those figures are “key competitive elements” of its “operational infrastructure”.
But Lundquist insists that what Google spends on electricity to run its own servers, makes its green talk on “hybrid cars, solar panels and power supplies would look very shallow”.
Measure the lifecycle
Others, including BroadGroup Consulting and some environmentalists like Greenpeace, say the gain of selling an eco-friendly computer is diminished if CSCI participants do not do more to address whether their production processes and the eventual disposal of used computers are harming the environment.
Selling an eco-friendly computer is just one element of the total picture, BroadGroup says. Gartner agrees and urges IT companies to consider the entire lifecycle of a computer to effectively combat emissions.
Mark Mills, a physicist, author and co-founding partner of energy tech venture fund Digital Power Capital, warns that the computing initiative partners have forgotten to mention a “basic economic reality”. Although they may be able to significantly improve the efficiency of each computer or server, more efficiency makes computing cheaper, driving up overall demand and usage.
The bottom line, Mills says, is that increased usage will result in more energy being consumed, not less.
This is good for Google and many of its CSCI friends, since they make their money by meeting the ever-growing demand for computing resources.
So, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative clearly represents the business case for doing good.
But bold green statements from technology companies like Google are currently being undermined by their unwillingness to address less popular issues including a lack of transparency over total energy usage, and other obvious climate issues like recycling.
Useful links:
www.google.com
www.climatesaverscomputing.org
www.epa.gov
www.gartner.com
Respond:
Write to Lisa Roner, North America Editor at Lisa.Roner@ethicalcorp.com,
or write to the Editor at zara.maung@ethicalcorp.com.
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