Updates from Europe. Click on "Europe" tag above for all news about the region. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe.

2013

We've regularly covered GreenQloud, which uses Iceland's location advantages to offer renewables-powered hosting services. Its latest offering is StorageQloud, an elastic cloud storage service, and a companion app called CloudSync. Through the company's Truly Green™ Dashboard, "We calculate the CO2 emissions each user has avoided by using GreenQloud, based on home origin and energy usage." Beta versions of CloudSync are available for Windows and OS X, but not for mobile platforms.

2012

ITU's Green Standards Week (17-21 Sep, Paris, FR) features sessions such as "Greening the ICT Supply Chain" and "Environmental Sustainability for the ICT Sector".

UK's Energy Efficient Computing Special Interest Group (EEC SIG) "will support the TSB's Emerging Technologies & Industries programme by accelerating the development and commercial use of products, processes and services based on EEC technology." The SIG is a partnership between the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the Electronics, Sensors, Photonics Knowledge Transfer Network (ESP KTN) and the ICT KTN. See more on the TSB's Green ICT efforts, below.

Belgium's Cluttr was the only Green ICT company selected to present this summer at GigaOM's Structure 2012 LaunchPad, "a competition recognizing emerging startups in the cloud computing industry". The early-stage venture provides software and services to improve data center energy efficiency.

The UK's Technology Strategy Board and its partners will "invest up to £1.25m in feasibility studies to encourage technologies which can reduce the mounting energy burden of computing and communications devices and systems…This collaborative demonstrator competition focuses on the design and development of energy-efficient hardware and software, not only for large-scale systems relying on computing capacity but also for mobile devices and embedded chips." The competition closes on 5 Dec 2012.

Sweden's TCO Development says it offers "the world’s first sustainability certification exclusively for tablets". Its initial tablet database offers just three models, all from Samsung.

The Low Carbon Materials Processing Group at the University of Cambridge tested toner-print removal from paper by employing a variety of lasers. "The results showed that toner-print can be removed effectively without causing significant paper damage, allowing the paper to be reused, without being discarded, shredded or sent to a recycling plant…reusing paper could save an additional 50-80% in carbon emissions over recycling." The next step would be to find a sponsor to build a prototype.

Topics moved: TREND Network of Excellence on energy-efficient networking - ETSI Workshop on Energy Efficiency

The IEEE's GreenCom'09 conference noted: "The European Commission is estimating that by 2012 the energy consumption in the home for [broadband] fruition will reach 50 TWh, from basically 0 TWh in the year 2000."

2011

Click here for Green ICT in Europe updates from 2011 and earlier.