NewWays for Environmental and Social Change

There, Green Computing isn’t a save-the-planet-for-our-kids movement.  It’s about the other green: cutting operating costs as the demand for computing power soars. It’s a movement grounded in measurable, near-term results. “The top priority at hand is data center efficiency,” says Sabet Elias, CTO of investment bank Lehman Brothers, which last year boosted energy efficiency 25% and set a goal of another 35% by next year.

It’s not just financial services companies, with their huge processing
needs, that stand to benefit from green computing. Companies in every
industry, from nonprofits to consumer goods, are paying much closer
attention to their power bills, as the amount spent on data center
power has doubled

Elias wants to cut energy use 35% at Lehman Brothers.

in the past six years. “The CFO is getting the bills, and IT is the
biggest user of energy,” says Robert Rosen, CIO of the National
Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disorders. IT execs
like Elias and Rosen say they’re happy their conservation efforts have
a social good, but they measure their progress in dollars saved.

Still, IT execs would be wise to keep an eye on more than the economics
of energy-efficient computing. Energy consumption has gotten so
huge–U.S. data centers consume as much power in a year as is generated
by five power plants–that policy makers are taking notice and
considering more regulation. A group of government and industry leaders
is trying to set a clear standard for what constitutes a “green”
computer, a mark that IT execs might find themselves held to. Global
warming concerns could spark a public opinion swing–either a backlash
against big data centers or a PR win for companies that can paint
themselves green. IT vendors are piling on, making energy efficiency
central to their sales pitches and touting eco-friendly policies such
as “carbon-neutral computing.”

One under-the-radar example of what’s changing is a long acronym you’ll
start hearing more: EPEAT, or the Electronic Product Environmental
Assessment Tool. EPEAT was created through an Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers council because companies and government
agencies wanted to put green criteria in IT requests for proposals.
EPEAT got a huge boost on Jan. 24 when President Bush signed an
executive order requiring that 95% of electronic products procured by
federal agencies meet EPEAT standards, as long there’s a standard for
that product.

The tech industry’s environmental impact is gaining attention. The
United Nations estimates that 20 million to 50 million tons of computer
gear and cell phones worldwide are dumped into landfills each year, and
it’s the fastest growing segment of waste, says Greenpeace legislative
director Rick Hind. At most, 12% of PCs and cell phones are recycled, he says, putting chemicals such as mercury and PVC into the environment. “The good news is that computer companies are talking about greenness, touting green programs,” Hind says.

CIOs will keep setting IT strategy against their bottom lines, but
they’re sure to face more questions about whether there’s a chance to
meet environmental goals at the same time. Here’s a practical guide to
what’s happening in Green Computing, and why IT people should care.

Energy consumed by data centers in the United States and worldwide
doubled from 2000 to 2005, according to Jonathan Koomey, a consulting
professor at Stanford University and staff scientist at Lawrence
Berkeley National Lab. Data center servers, air conditioning, and networking
equipment sucked up 1.2% of U.S. power in 2005. The biggest reason for
the power surge: double the number of low-end servers, Koomey says.

As a result, some companies are chasing cheaper data center power. Google
is building a data center on Oregon’s Columbia River to tap
hydroelectric power, while Microsoft builds nearby in Washington for
the same reason. Financial services company HSBC is building a data
center near Niagara Falls. Some such efforts are hardly green, however.
Wyoming’s trying to lure data centers with the promise of cheap power
from coal-fired plants.

But chasing cheap power isn’t practical for most
companies. For Lehman Brothers, proximity to New York City is crucial
because automated trading programs can’t spare the milliseconds it
takes for data to travel to upstate New York and back, though a remote
data center could work for certain batch jobs. At lighting products
company Osram Sylvania, the data center isn’t so time sensitive, but
the company wouldn’t consider the hassle of building a remote center to
lower power costs. “Finding the talent pool and network services you
need aren’t easy if you move too far away,” says operations manager Dan
Wilson.

For these companies, Green Computing means staying put and cutting
costs. Fortunately, environmentally friendly options are rising as fast
as energy prices.

Virtualization is one of the most effective tools for more
cost-effective, greener computing. By dividing each server into
multiple virtual machines that run different applications, companies
can increase their server utilization rates and shrink their sprawling
farms. This approach is so energy friendly that California utility
PG&E offers rebates of $300 to $600 for each server that companies
eliminate using Sun or VMware virtualization products, with a maximum rebate of $4 million or 50% of the project’s cost, whichever is less.

The actual rebate may be far more modest, and it won’t drive a
virtualization project’s return on investment. Swinerton Construction
estimated it would get a $3,200 rebate from PG&E when it
implemented VMware virtual machines, but it ended up with only $800
after PG&E’s complicated calculations for power use, senior network
administrator Sean Saulsbury says. But the project already has saved
the company $140,000 this year, including servers it hasn’t had to buy
and $50,000 in power and cooling savings.

More-efficient processors are another critical energy-saving element,
as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Sun Microsystems all have gotten
the green religion. Where chipmakers used to compete entirely on speed,
now they also compete on performance per watt. Sun’s betting on
multicore chip efficiency to fuel interest in new high-end servers. Its
32-thread Niagara 1 chip, Ultrasparc 1, consumes 60 to 62 watts, while
the Niagara 2 chip
due in the second half will have 64 threads yet run at 80 watts, says
chief architect Rick Hetherington. When Intel launched its quad-core
Xeon chips beginning in November, it noted that they could deliver 1.8
teraflop peak performance using less than 10,000 watts, compared with
800,000 10 years ago using Pentium chips.

How big a difference can more-efficient processors make? Princeton
University’s plasma physics lab, funded by the Department of Energy,
cut 75% of its annual power and cooling bill–from $105,000 in 2003 to
$27,000 last year–while improving processing power three to four
times. The lower energy use also means it’s emitting about 28 fewer
tons of carbon dioxide, says Paul Henderson, head of the lab’s systems
and network group. It did so by replacing a cluster of 200 servers based on AMD Athlon chips with Sun X2100 servers based on dual-core AMD Opteron chips.

For every kilowatt of energy consumed by a server, roughly another
kilowatt is chewed up to cool it today. Highmark, the largest health
insurer in Pennsylvania, uses about 150 blade servers, which reduce the
space needed, but their heat and density suck up the cooling. Highmark
uses a system that detects air temperature at the server racks and
“tunnels” cooled air to the equipment using special racks from Wright
Line, rather than cool the entire room. (Highmark takes the environment
seriously enough that the toilets in its eco-designed data center are
flushed using rainwater collected from the roof.) Other vendors, such
as DegreeControl and, beginning this summer, Hewlett-Packard, offer
cooling systems that rely on sensors to direct cooling to the needed
spot.

Osram Sylvania’s Wilson says most companies aren’t interested in paying
more up front, and they are watching energy improvements closely enough
to know if they pay off. “You really need the discipline and patience
to do this every day,” he says.

“Voluntary guidelines” isn’t exactly the rallying cry of an
environmental revolution. Yet two forthcoming guidelines embraced by
U.S. regulators, combined with tough laws from the European Union on
hazardous materials, could go a long way toward forcing Green Computing
onto businesses.

Let’s start with EPEAT. Bush’s directive to use EPEAT for government
buying guarantees these standards will get some traction. But
businesses will likely find them useful when they need a shorthand way
to buy green.

	Tech vendors buy wind power for “carbon offsets”.

EPEAT
was developed over the past three years by 100 stakeholders, including
electronics manufacturers, with funding from an Environmental
Protection Agency grant. They cover only PCs and monitors today but
will likely be extended to servers, routers, printers, and maybe even
cell phones.

The standards dictate 23 required criteria and 28 optional criteria for
IT vendors covering eight broad categories, including energy
conservation, recycling or disposal, packaging, and reduction or
elimination of dangerous materials such as PVC, mercury, and lead. Some
350 products from 14 vendors are EPEAT-compliant, though none at the
highest, gold rating.

EPEAT’s energy-consumption criteria are based on the EPA’s Energy Star
requirements for PCs, and the “sensitive material” criteria require
companies to meet the European Union’s tough standards for limiting the
hazardous chemicals and components used to make them.

The Energy Star ratings on PCs are just like those on refrigerators and
washing machines, but the PC standard has become largely irrelevant for
businesses, as the last update came five years ago. That will change in
July, when the EPA issues new, more demanding specs for energy
efficiency of PCs and high-end CAD/CAM workstations.

PC energy savings can make a difference to companies. Union Bank of
California expects to reduce its energy costs 10% to 12% annually just
by buying more energy-efficient PCs, says Julie LeDuc, the bank’s VP of
IT product procurement.

The EPA could have an even bigger impact by putting Energy Star ratings
on servers, since they’re the biggest electricity hogs in IT. The
agency is developing tests to compare server energy consumption, but it
doesn’t expect to have methods ready until the end of this year.

Among the strictest regulations on the computer industry are the
European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive, or
ROHS. Introduced last year, the directive, which covers hardware sold
in the EU, restricts the use of six toxic substances, including lead
and mercury. China and India are expected to adopt versions of ROHS
within the next year. The EU has two other significant green-tech
rules: the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment regulations, which
require sellers to take back any product they sell for recycling; and
Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, which aims to
improve the management and risk assessment of dangerous chemicals. The
United States has no federal computer recycling mandate, but
California’s Electronic Waste Recycling Act is a “cradle to grave”
program aimed at reducing hazardous substances in electronic products
sold in that state. It includes a recycling fee of $6 to $10 paid by
the buyer of PCs and monitors. Other states are likely to follow.

ROHS standards are slowly becoming de facto requirements, as the United
States makes them part of the EPEAT standards and vendors look to
standardize products worldwide. “There’s a global marketplace for IT,
so when there are new regulations by the EU, we all benefit,” says
Andrew Fanara, the EPA’s Energy Star products team leader.

Salesforce.com in January announced an initiative to “offset its carbon
footprint”–that is, compensate for the 19,700 tons of carbon emissions
created by everything from its data centers to employee travel. That
effort includes a partnership with Native Energy, a Native
American-owned company involved in renewable energy projects, and
$126,000 invested in five projects to develop alternative energy
sources, including windmill and methane farms.

Sun created a Sun Eco office a year ago to oversee all of the company’s green programs, including telecommuting
but also core products such as low-power servers. It’s touting its
Project Blackbox–a data center in a shipping container–as not just
portable but also 20% more energy-efficient than today’s data centers.

Cisco also pulled most of its green initiatives under one umbrella, the Eco Board. Its efforts include using its own high-end videoconferencing and other IP tools to cut company travel by 20% a year–2 million miles–which the company estimates will lower its CO₂
emissions by 10%, or 72,000 tons, says Laura Ipsen, VP of global policy
and government affairs, who co-chairs the Eco Board. Cisco also is
working with San Francisco, Seoul, and Amsterdam, to find ways to reduce CO₂ through broadband and other networking technologies that support telework.

Dell in February launched “Plant A Tree For Me,” where consumers pay an
extra $2 for a laptop or $6 for a desktop to plant trees aimed at
offsetting the equivalent computer emissions. It launched www.dell.com/earth
to tout its green policies. HP says it has offered recycling since
1987, and today lets consumers send back equipment from HP or
competitors. It keeps products such as old Digital Equipment VAX and
Alphaserver machines available for parts, for instance. HP set a goal
in 2004 to take back 1 billion pounds of product for recycling by 2007,
and it brought in 164 million last year.

With rising concerns about identity theft
and data breaches, companies need to know there’s no sensitive data
left on machines before they’re trashed or recycled. That led Union
Bank of California to more secure disposal that also proved to be more
green.

The bank hires a company called Intechra that erases data from drives
and removes asset tags and other forms of corporate identification,
then refurbishes them for resale or grinds them up to recycle the
material. None of it goes in a landfill. Union Bank pays $20 to $30 per
PC for disposal and gets back 50% to 60% of any resale value, which is
about $200 to $300 on high-end notebooks and $50 on desktop PCs.
“Without this, we’d have to have an internal team scrub the old
systems,” procurement VP LeDuc says.

The city of Riverside, Calif., started a program to accept donated PCs, which the city promises to wipe
clean, then give or sell to low-income families. It’s part of an effort
to get all of its citizens wired, which includes getting AT&T to
build a city Wi-Fi
network. The city pays up to $35 a unit, and CIO Steve Reneker is
trying to get Dell and HP to sell units coming off lease. It’s given
out 750 computers so far, with a goal of 3,000 a year.

Recycling can get citizens connected, Reneker says.

Telecommuting
IT can directly help reduce greenhouse gases if it enables
telecommuting, though it’s one of those things that goes in and out of
fashion. The federal government, for instance, since 2001 has required
agencies to have a formal policy to let eligible workers telecommute,
but many have been slow to act, often because managers aren’t sure how
to deal with remote reports. Since June, the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office has had a “hoteling” program that lets up to 500 examiners work
from home except for at least one hour a week when they need to go to a
government office (a piece of red tape left from a rule by the Office
of Personnel Management). Over the next five years, 500 more patent
examiners will be permitted to work from home. Over at the trademark
office, 85% of its 413 examiners work from home full time, except for
the once-a-week check-in.

At Sun, 14,219 employees work from home two days a week, and 2,800 work
from home three to five days a week. Some use “drop-in centers” closer
to home that save an average of 90 minutes in commute time. About 40%
of employees use the telecommuting program to some extent. That saves
6,660 office seats, cutting Sun’s real estate costs by $63 million in
the last fiscal year, says Sudboh Bapat, Sun’s Eco VP and distinguished
engineer. Reduced commuting by Sun workers avoided an estimated 29,000
tons of CO₂ emissions, he says.

Gartner estimates that 12.6 million U.S. workers teleworked last year
more than eight hours a week. But Gartner thinks that number will grow
just 3% this year. Not exactly on pace to save the planet.

That’s the reality of corporate green initiatives. Companies will push
telecommuting if it helps them retain employees or cut office expenses.
They might tally car emissions after the fact, but it won’t drive many
business decisions. “Green Computing is on the radar screens of CIOs,
but it’s not primarily motivated by eco-friendliness,” says Jim Noble,
CIO of Altria, parent company of Philip Morris and Kraft Foods. “The
primary motivation is technology’s cost.” The good news for Mother
Earth is that there are a lot of money-saving, eco-friendly steps just
waiting for IT execs to take.