Traditional ICT facilities consume as much energy cooling their gear as powering it the first place. One solution is to re-use the waste heat.

Updates from Asia-Pacific. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe. Click on 'Asia-Pac' tag above for all news about the region. (Information about the ICT implications of Japan's earthquake and tsunami have been moved to its own post.)

2012

The deadline for entries in Hong Kong's 2012 Best Green ICT Award. The deadline for entry into the four categories is 6 February 2012. This is the first Green ICT award in China of which I am aware.

Oracle's latest Next Generation Data Centre Index compares today's situation ("C2") with that of a year ago ("C1") for Europe and the Middle East. Findings are positive but mixed from a Green ICT perspective.

Fifteen manufacturers offer ENERGY STAR® qualified servers. Cisco and Huawei (China) are the latest. Hitachi and Wipro appear to no longer offer qualified models.

We first looked at the impact of social media in 2007 with Virtual Worlds Leave a Real World Carbon Footprint. Since then, there has been increasing focus on the mega-data centers that underlie the most popular services. Facebook, who has opted for a custom server approach to reducing PUE, has take the unique step of publishing its server and facility designs. Facebook calls this the Open Compute Project. The Project just picked up a surprising ally - Greenpeace.

2011

French energy company Dalkia is developing a business park whose data center heat "will be transmitted via a heat exchanger to a new heating network that will eventually supply green energy to buildings with a surface area of 600,000 sq. m. (6,458,350 sq. ft.). " Dalkia projects that "More than 5,400 metric tons of CO2 emissions will be saved each year." Some media outlets have focused on EuroDisney's ownership stake in the business park near its amusement park, but there appear to be no plans to use the heat from the former in the latter. Click the "reuse-heat" tag at the top of this post for more examples.

Liquid cooling was once a staple of large-scale computing, but has increasingly been replaced by air cooling. Now, several companies are applying liquid cooling to standard servers to reduce energy. One, through a Swedish research initiative, is also seeking to recapture heat.

Mobile devices and services are growing cloud computing at a dizzying pace. How clean are these clouds?

Most ICT gear - core facilities, communications infrastructures, and edge devices - runs on DC power. Converting AC to DC within a building is inefficient, on-site renewable power generation is usually DC to begin with, and super-efficient LED lighting is also DC. So DC power distribution has been a attractive option, but there have been vigorous arguments for and against. Recent events suggest the tide is turning in favor of DC distribution.

Image courtesy IEEE Spectrum