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.

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.

This is solar-powered base station on top of a mountain in Lapland (Finland).

Remote ICT infrastructures are embracing renewable energy for everything from earthquake mitigation in Japan to CO2e reduction in India to military microgrids in Afghanistan. Africa is now participating, as well.

Email and email attachments have less environmental impact than physical delivery. But email is not without its own costs, both in terms of energy/carbon footprints and organizational productivity. A French company has taken a hard look at this and announced that it will move toward "zero email". At the same time, a German company has stopped its servers from routing some email after hours.

Electronic media are important components of global ICT as movies, television, music, and books all go digital. This post offers a global sampling of sustainability in e-media; see much more by clicking on the "Green media" tag, above.

NBC/Universal reports that The Tonight Show with Jay Leno "Reduced the show’s paper usage by 16 reams a week (or 1 tree a week, adding up to 50 trees every year) by utilizing digital distributions for paper-related materials." The production also "Transitioned to rechargeable batteries, which is currently saving 120 batteries a week or 5,400 a year."

UK's Waste & Resources Action Programme (WARP) conducted a study of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) content of Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs). What can we learn, besides UK greens' fondness for initials? Turns out media, not IT, gear is the largest category. Upgrades are driving this waste stream.

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.

Vertatique's comprehensive vision of ICT includes e-media infrastructures and practices. News Corporation one of the world's largest media empires, so the company is a logical one for us to track. We first began looking at NewsCorp in July 2006, when company executive (and chairman's son) James Murdoch talked about the media industry going green. Among his claims back then: NewsCorps' satellite broadcasting arm BSkyB is already "carbon neutral".

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.

UK telecom provider BT is working on broadband delivery technology that varies its power in response to demand.
The "latest generation of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) line cards - which allow up to 20Mbit/s broadband speeds on the last mile of the network - [operates] in an 'always available' rather than 'always fully on' mode…BT’s network infrastructure currently accounts for more than 60 per cent of its carbon footprint and the access network represents a large part." BT reports this new tech - called "cool broadband" - is still under development, but has already been used in a small customer trial.