In a new series of articles looking at the technology sector, Ecopoint’s Chief Strategy Officer investigates the impacts of information and communications technologies (ICT), the implications of its rapidly escalating adoption, and highlights opportunities for ICT to play an important role in the fight against climate change.
Every human activity can be measured in terms of its carbon impacts, and those carbon emissions contribute directly to man-made global warming. Depending on which source you rely on, ICT currently accounts for over 2% of global carbon emissions – on a par with the environmentalists’ bugbear, aviation (and growing much more rapidly).
At first glance, ICT looks to be a major part of the problem, and it may seem surprising that ICT – to date – has not come under a similar level of scrutiny to aviation from civil society, regulators and activists.
ICT in context: putting some worrying numbers on the table
Let’s start, appropriately, with some rather telling headline data points:
- ICT accounts for up to 14% of direct and indirect global energy use…
- … and around 10% of our total electricity consumption;
- It accounts for up to 40% of electricity used in offices, and as much as 65% of consumption in so called “green buildings”.
To add to this picture, the growth in impacts from ICT continues largely unchecked, with annual growth rates in energy consumption reported as anywhere between 10 and 20%.
Consensus estimates indicate ICT manufacture, distribution, use and disposal account today for between 2% (sources: Gartner Group, McKinsey, Accenture) and 4% (source: Forrester) of global carbon emissions. The increasing demand for data storage, computation and communications is projected to grow ICT carbon emissions by 50% over the next ten years, accounting for 3-4% of global emissions by 2020 even after factoring in anticipated improvements in efficiency (source: McKinsey).
The impacts of ICT: beyond carbon
The impacts of ICT aren’t just about energy and carbon – the environmental and social impacts are far wider than that.
In some developed countries, waste from ICT accounts for 70% of heavy metals in landfill sites, whilst much of ICT related toxic waste is dumped in developing nations (largely unmanaged and unregulated).
Similarly, ICT products are highly energy and material intensive to manufacture (think about the “1.7kg” CPU), yet only a tiny percentage are ever recycled.
At least two, if not three, sides to the ICT story
There can be no hiding from the data: the direct impacts of ICT are significant, measurable and growing rapidly. As a result, the ICT sector can expect to “come under greater scrutiny from regulators and customers in the future as concerns about emissions continue to grow” (Simon Mingay, Gartner Group).
But there’s another side to the story: what are the opportunities for ICT to clean up its own act, and – crucially – how can ICT help us to reduce impacts across the board from other human activities?
ICT: the good news is that it’s not terribly efficient
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the good news for the industry is that ICT is not all that efficient, with big potential for both direct and indirect carbon savings. Unlike aviation, these widespread inefficiencies across the ICT sector mean there is real potential to drive savings. There is also substantial low hanging fruit available from changing user behaviours.
In the case of data centres, which account for 25% of global ICT emissions according to Gartner Group, carbon emissions related to usage can readily be cut by “60% or more using currently available technologies” (JP Rangaswami, Managing Director – Design, British Telecom) irrespective of whether this is new build or refresh. Spiralling energy costs mean that electricity bills are now becoming highly material to data centre operations, overtaking for the first time in 2008 installed hardware lifecycle and software licensing costs. The bottom line is that both energy and carbon are rapidly rattling up the CTO agenda.
Representing 1/4 of sector emissions and with massive overprovisioning there are (without wishing to get too technical) huge opportunities to reduce the impacts of data centres:
- Reduce IT Load: Consolidate, virtualize, decommission, dynamic power load management, power management, right size, efficient servers, architectural / software choices
- Reduce Cooling Load: CFD Analysis, air flow improvements, free cooling, layout (hot /cold aisles)
- Reduce Power Distribution Losses: UPS, power supplies, DC vs. AC, distributed generation (CHP, solar, etc.), onsite renewables
Companies from Google to Microsoft, IBM to HP, British Telecom to SingTel are starting to address the data centre challenges, and in a range of novel ways. Despite the differences in approach, with some focusing on replacing grid electricity with clean energy, others addressing provisioning and redundancy, every organization that has embarked on the date centre efficiency journey is reaping big energy cost and carbon savings, with paybacks of as little as three years.
What about all those monitors switched on night and day in homes and offices?
These impacts from data centres and the opportunities to reduce them are things that are largely invisible to most people. So what about the things we can see?
PCs and monitors account for almost 40% of ICT related energy use and emissions and up to 15% of energy consumption from office equipment.
Staggeringly, 60% of PCs remain switched on overnight! Whilst each PC may use a very limited amount of energy, collectively the impacts are enormous. This is a massive opportunity, and big companies are just starting to get in on the act. In an office environment there is much that can be done, from measuring and reporting office power consumption, enforcing “aggressive” power management settings, and ditching the active screen savers, through to educating staff – not just the users but the IT departments that are causing many of the issues in the first place with highly conservative attitudes. It’s amazing how many times I hear from IT managers that “we have to leave all the PCs on overnight so we can schedule updates”. Hello! This is 2011, and we have software that can deal with that right now, without leaving all PCs switched on permanently.
If the opportunity is so big, why isn’t change happening more quickly?
The answer to that question is actually quite complicated. But in a nutshell, the opportunities at a vendor level remain under-exploited due to a lack of coordination industry-wide, shortage of information and insufficient transparency.
In terms of ICT usage, much of the blame should be pointed squarely at IT departments. Equally, user behaviours need to change, and that kind of change doesn’t come quickly or easily.
The reality however is that the ICT sector has real, significant and addressable opportunities to reduce its impacts.
The even better news is that the benefits of ICT innovation in reducing emissions from other human activities far outweigh ICT’s direct impacts. Beyond direct reduction, ICT can do far more to change the world we live in, how we go about our lives, and the impacts of all of that.
In the next article we will look at the range of ways technology is helping to reduce our emissions across industry and in our daily lives.
SOURCE : http://www.ecopoint.asia/ict-major-part-of-the-problem-or-key-to-reducing-our-impacts/
AUTHOR : Dean Stanton
