Government entities have an important role to play in encouraging sustainable ICT across all industries. Effective leadership requires internal implementation, as well. The tag at the top of this post - 'government' - helps you easily locate posts containing opportunities for and applications of Green ICT in government operations. (Green ICT in public education is found through the 'education' tag.) We note briefer items in this post, but haven't updated it recently. An email from TCO Certified reminded us that municipalities continue to pursue Green ICT purchasing.

Energy, climate, water and/or geophysical safety can be drivers for locations across North America. We periodically update this post with new developments. The most recent is about a LinkedIn data center. You can learn about location drivers in other regions in our related article.

Electricity and water don't mix? Our quest for innovative Green ICT concepts has turned up many unusual concepts doing just that. The latest is a proposal for submerging entire data centers.

We first encountered air-borne pollution as a threat when we reported about the impact of volcanic ash on Icelandic data centers. Man-made pollution is also an issue.

A competition between two locations in the western United States highlight two big sustainability issues for mega data centers - energy and water. Utah and New Mexico are both vying for a new Facebook "data warehouse".

Short 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. Our latest item looks at the scope of GreenICT.

The 2016 Seed Awards in India are promoting a "Green ICT" theme, but the description is a little off. "Does your eco-inclusive enterprise demonstrate social & environmental impacts through application of information and communications technology? Or does it provide solutions for sustainable consumption or production using information and communications technology?" This appears to be an example of confusing GreenICT with ICT4Green, nevertheless, we would encourage any enterprise with a true Green ICT focus to consider entering. This can help align ICT4D with Green ICT.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) services provider Akamai has launched a major initiative to reduce its GHG emissions. Most notable is its commitment to an absolute, not relative, reduction.

Akamai's May 2016 announcement: "Today we are committing, by 2020, to reduce our absolute greenhouse gas emissions below 2015 levels by sourcing renewable energy for 50 percent of our network operations."

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 often DC to begin with, and super-efficient LED lighting is also DC. All this seems to make DC power distribution an attractive option for ICT facilities, but there have been vigorous arguments for and against. Recent events, beginning a 380-V DC standard for ICT power distribution in 2011, suggest the tide is turning in favor of DC distribution.

Image courtesy IEEE Spectrum

Handling our gear's heat has always been an issue for installations large and small. ICT equipment typical took 1x-2x again more energy to remove its heat as it took to power it in the first place (PUE of 2.0+), driving both energy costs and carbon footprints. Early efforts focused on the two obvious tactics: make both the ICT gear and the air conditioning more efficient. We now see these augmented by innovative new approaches to the problem, ranging from seawater cooling to variable-speed fan retrofits.

Liquid cooling was once a staple of large-scale computing, but has largely been replaced by air cooling. We identified several efforts to bring liquid cooling to the server world in our first version of this post in 2012 and have seen continuous progress since. Here is the latest news.