Here’s a little fact sheet mixed with some thoughts on Green IT. Green IT is a truly serious topic that should be thought over and tackled over a long period of time. There is not one answer to the sustainable development challenge. On thing that’s pretty sure though is that Information Technology, an industry that grows steadily, represents a part of the problem and probably has the potential to generate the bulk of the solution.

CURRENT SITUATION

• According to the Gartner Group, 2% of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are generated by computer networks. Airlines are responsible for the exact same percentage of gas emissions. This figure is bound to increase due to the fact that 3 million new Internet users join the web every month – the bulk of them surfing from their cellular phones; and the huge investments Web players do in datacenters (I noticed something like one third of funds raised by self-hosting SaaS or web startups are aimed at datacenter investments).

• Consider a file. In its entire life cycle, it will consume 10 times more energy than it took to create because: it will be edited, saved, stored on a client hard drive, printed, sent by email, stored on a server, etc. For every new file created, 400 Gbytes of bandwidth need to be added to the Internet (think Video on Demand or advertising banner…).

• Every second that passes sees 24 Kg of PCs produced, 1.8 tons of raw materials aimed at the Information Technology market, half a ton of CO2 generated by hardware heat, 108 Kg. of PC-related garbage.

• Today, there are about 315 million PCs obsolete enough to need a recycling. Huge market! Any creative entrepreneur in the room?

• 2 billion more Internet users will cost 3 times more energy to connect.

THREATS

• Permalinks urge servers to be connected 24/7/365. Albeit it unleashes positive collaborative energies, Web 2.0 is extremely resource consuming.

• VoIP is a fantastic cost-killing opportunity. But it increases traffic dramatically. This issue will have to be tackled at some point. Again, there is huge a market for a VoIP secure compression standard just in case some genius entrepreneur happens to read these lines. We are still in need of an MP3 or DivX standard for IP voice messages.

• RAID redundancies imply  purchasing 2 hard drives. Which actually increases consumption by a factor of 2.

• Cellphones do more and more things everyday. Will a printer be embedded in every mobile phone in a future?

SOLUTIONS

• Multi core processors (produce less heat, more powerful)

• Grid (calculation resource mutualization)

• Working from home from time to time saves time (you don’t waste 2 hours a day in traffic) to yourself and money to your company (more time to work resulting from commute time saved). Furthermore, leaving the car in the garage lowers CO2 emissions.

• Bicycles to go to work (see the Velib initiative in Paris, designed and operated by JCDecaux & user interface + inventory system built on the Microsoft platform) cf. picture above

• Electricity consumption optimization software solutions like IDEAS program startups KalibraXe (a marketplace that allows your company to lower its electricity bill through lowering sourcing costs by making suppliers compete on price) and DOTVision Streetlight Vision (that help cities reduce their electricity bills: who hasn’t  seen a street lamp switched on during the day?). Both ‘undergo’ severe 4-digit growths and I actually believe there is a huge market for clean tech + software solutions. Most of the time, sustainable development and economic performance constrains are aligned. I don’t think these could ever part ways.

• Creative ways to lower server load: use [RSS + cache] combinations as included in Google Reader or use solutions like FaceBook in consumer environments, or blueKiwi in enterprise environments to lower the number of emails, which reduces storage and bandwidth needs through centralizing all the information within a social entity on one single location (eg Facebook group or blueKiwi topic board).

• This is something we do at Microsoft: every file printed out has its own cover sheet mentioning the author. This way, people save the first page (that mention the author) by putting it in a recycling bin and are bound not to take print outs that aren’t theirs – you know, when you realize you took someone else’s printouts – it’s often too far to go and put it back…

• Use recycled paper for draft printing AND corporate communications AND product brochures. Basically, use recycled paper as much as you can. Some people say the recycling process is more energy-intensive than the process of destroying. I don’t believe recycling has no future: I see it as a very convenient solution to start working in the right direction.

• Server virtualization has turned the tables: running many environments on a single machine made the computer industry paradigm shift from “1 application = 1 server”. In many companies, when there used to be 8 servers used at 10% each, you now find one server used at 80% of its capacities + 1 back-up server. On top of that, it all results in costing less in Air Conditioning to keep the room cool. I therefore bought some VMWare stock recently …

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