Green IT - economics meets environment

IT and Energy

IT industry is amongst the faster growing consumers of energy and thus source of indirect emissions through electricity use. There's huge potential for energy efficiency in this area and thankfully wise people have taken notice and are already onto the task. 

"With a 10 percent improvement of overall energy efficiency in data centers by 2011, approximately 10 billion kilowatt-hours would be saved, equivalent to electricity consumed by 1 million U.S. households annually. This energy cutback would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6.5 million tons per year—equal to the removal of nearly 1.3 million cars from the road annually."

U.S. Department of Energy

Here's a brief discussion on the major players who can help the environment through economics of energy efficiency - 

Corporations through 'Green Grid' - 

Recognizing the potential to save energy and help environment in this regard, a consortium of leading IT co.s including AMD and Hewlett Packard founded the Green Grid. The idea behind the GreenGrid is to make IT more energy efficient. The initiatives range from reducing electricity used to run the servers in a data center as well as reduce the energy required to mantain sub zero temperatures in the data centers. The green grid has alliances with - The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), US Department of Energy (DOE), US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) et. al and they work on developing standards for energy efficient IT operations. 

 

IT Consulting Companies -

Software Services companies like India's Wipro IT Consulting Services recognize the upcoming need for such solutions and are poised to realize the business potential in this arena. These companies are offering specialized consulting services to make IT operations more energy and environment efficient. 

http://www.wipro.com/greenit_new/pdf/whitepaper/wcir_the_green_data_center.pdf. 

Here's an example of potential energy and emissions savings as projected by Wipro - 

At a time when companies are looking for ways to reduce cost, savings to the tune of 80% will surely catch attention.  As this business area grows there can be a huge requirement for skilled professionals with experience and training to implement such initiatives. 

Non Profit Groups - 

An organization working on imparting training to professionals in this arena is the 'Environmental Defence Fund'. Through their Climate Corps internship program they tie up with companies looking for improvement in their energy profile to recruit summer interns from variuos MBA programs all over US, impart them training to optimize various business operations (in IT and other sectors as well) and send them to these companies over the summer to produce tangible results (http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=31477). 

IT is growing as a big consumer of energy. There's an intent in the industry to become more responsible in energy usage, as well as making green choices about the source of energy. In current economic conditions the initatives to purchase green energy for IT have been hurt, but at the same time the tough economic environment has accentuated the essentiality for IT companies to be more responsible, more efficient with energy.

The Tragedy of the Akosombo.

A very important question was raised in class today. Are large hydroelectric dams green? The response of the class captured the same difference in opinion that prevails on this issue. I will withhold my opinion for the time being and present a case study. I think it is a classic example of how, sometimes, matters of policy can go horribly wrong when engineering, economics and politics decide policies and the people, the ultimate beneficiaries, are left out of the equation.

In 1957, Ghana gained its independence. And in 1963 the Akosombo Dam (approximately 900MW) was constructed on the River Volta to boost industrialization and enhance economic progress of this newly independent country. The dam was also supposed to improve fishing, irrigated farming and tourism (!?) amongst other things. It indeed helped the aluminum industry in the region and as demands kept rising, another dam was built 1981 at Kpong, downstream to Akosombo. However, four and a half decades later, I would say, the two main contributions of the Akosombo dam may be summed up as: (a) creation of Lake Volta – the largest man-made lake in the world (covering an area of ~8500 sq. km and so large it can be seen from space!) (b) putting Ghana on the WHO problem list forever!

How? Well, this is what happened.

[1] Formation of the Lake Volta upstream (the enormity of which I’ve already tried to impress upon you) resulted in a bloom in aquatic weed and a certain kind of snail that fed on it. The snails were vectors for water-borne illnesses, mainly bilharzia (a chronic illness that can damage internal organs and, in children, impair growth and cognitive development). Prevalence rates bilharzias rose from 5% to 70-75% in some lakeside communities. In some cases, rates of almost 100% have been recorded among school children.

[2] Contrary to better upstream fishing claims, colonization of weed and snails, led to a drop in shrimp and clam population – the backbone of the rural fishing industry and the main source of protein for the local population. Downstream fishing also collapsed due to reduced flow.

[3] Crop yield also declined. The lake covered most of the fertile lands and natural flooding no longer left rich alluvial deposits that improved soil fertility in the overlying upland areas.

[4] The formation of the lake resulted in relocation of about 80,000 people, originally from 700 villages, into 52 resettlement villages. Many of the original villages comprised of indigenous ethnic groups. The relocation meant a loss of homes, primary occupation and even cultural and social belongingness.

Acute poverty (from [2]&[3]) and breakdown of social and cultural values in unfavorable resettlement conditions led to contraction of HIV and has since resulted in a very high prevalence of AIDS in the Volta basin communities.

Hydroelectric power is championed as an efficient and cheap source of power without major environmental impacts. But once in a while, debacles like Akosombo makes you wonder; after all how green is hydel? If noise from wind turbines is considered to be a nuisance and offshore wind farms face opposition for spoiling your ocean-view, this should be down on the green-scale by a few orders of magnitude! Also, when you add the millions spent on healthcare over decades, the losses in income from fishing and farming, the degradation in the standard of living of displaced populations – it is not very cheap! The Akosombo also asks another question: at what point should a country’s requirement for cheap power override other considerations?

However, this as I said is a classic example of how bad it may go. Things, in general, are not so bad on the water front!

PS: Due to silting, the flow of sediment to the Volta Estuary has been cut off by the dam, causing severe coastal erosion. The neighboring countries of Togo and Benin are also affected, whose coasts are now being eaten away at a rate of 10–15 meters per year. A project to strengthen the Togo coast has cost US$3.5 million for each kilometer protected (ref. 2).

--------------------------
Ref:
1. Gyau-Boakye, P. 2001. Environmental impacts of the akosombo dam and effects of climate change on the lake levels. Environment, Development and Sustainability 3(1): 17-29.
2. http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/africa/environmental-impacts-large-dams-african-examples
3. http://www.solutions-site.org/artman/publish/article_53.shtml
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akosombo_Dam

Gas from waste, a solution?

BBC News recently ran an article suggesting that green gas produced from waste could heat about half of the homes in the UK according to a report from the National Grid. Not only that, but the renewable gas would reduce carbon emissions, increase the UK’s energy security, and help reduce the amount of landfills in the country. The report says that a £10 billion investment could increase the amount of gas coming from renewable sources from 1% to about 18%. Is this investment worth it?

About 47% of CO2 emissions in the UK come from heating, significantly more than electricity and transportation. In the US, a lot of emphasis has been placed on reducing CO2 emissions from cars due to our heavy dependence on them, but in a country with a significantly better mass transportation system, it would make sense for money to be spent on R&D in other areas. The green gas is produced from anaerobic digestion of waste. Anaerobic microorganisms are able to break down waste in the absence of oxygen, which produces a methane and CO2 rich biogas suitable for energy production. If this gas was allowed to escape to the atmosphere, it would be about 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas then CO2 alone. It makes sense for this gas to be captured and put to good use. Anaerobic digestion facilities have recently been recognized as being less capital intensive than large power plants. Furthermore, the resulting gas can be transported through pre-existing pipelines to heat homes.

This process is not only up for further consideration in the UK, but also here in the US in Nebraska. As an agriculturally focused state, a great amount of by-product is produced from the livestock. Senator Ben Nelson is hoping to make the resulting biogas a commercial alternative to traditional natural gas with the help of the federal government. He’s hoping to create a tax-incentive that would encourage greater production of the biogas which would in turn create more jobs in rural communities.

In a world with a continuously growing population, concern needs to be extended not only towards diminishing fossil fuels but also the waste the population produces. By capturing the biogas emitted from landfills and using it to heat homes, these two concerns can be addressed. Although it requires a large investment of money, in the long run, fossil fuels will be saved and land will be recovered that can be put to other uses.

References:

• BBC News
• McCook Daily Gazette
• Wikipedia - Anaerobic digestion
  

You look good in green!

NY Times featured an article about clothing companies that make the carbon footprint of their clothing available to the public. I went clothes shopping for the first time in a few months this past weekend, and I think having information on the travel, resources and carbon emissions would have been very interesting to have for making clothing decisions. The article notes that clothing could have a similar rating system to energy star appliances. I think it would be a great incentive for consumers to buy greener clothes, and manufactures to create more environmentally friendly clothes. One Patagonia item of clothing was estimated by the manufactures to produce 15 lbs of CO2. To me that seems like a lot, especially considering Patagonia is a fairly environmentally conscious company. I wonder what the emissions of the companies that aren't very environmentally friendly would be.

Marie Claire has featured articles about living and sporting eco-chic clothes and lifestyle for earth day. A lot of the clothing is a bit out of my price range, but seeing all of the green fashion trends makes me hopefully that the green trends will trickle down to clothing that is more in my price range. I think knowing the life cycle and carbon footprint of clothing is important. We spend our lives in clothes, so they should reflect our lifestyle choices.

Green Things

I enjoyed Steve Glenn's presentation on the design and creative aspects involved with being more ecologically responsible this morning. At heart I’m really a design guy; I love when things work well and look nice. I believe that there doesn’t need to be a tradeoff between performance, functionality, aesthetics, and the environment. As we saw with LivingHomes, these aspects can come together to create beautiful products.

As I was checking the news tonight, I came across a nice piece in Business Week about some popular green products. What really got me to the site was that the Macbook Air was the first product mentioned. When the Air was announced back at Macworld, a lot of emphasis was put on its design and how it is less intensive on the environment. Some examples include: LED backlighting (no fluorescents or mercury in the display) and 50% less packaging (Apple packaging is an art in itself).

There are other nice products listed in the piece (Umbra compostable trash can, I’m looking at you) and a smart power meter for your home. We’ll learn a lot about DSM next week, but a substantial savings in energy (and money) can be achieved by knowing when electricity is more expensive to generate. These are just a few products and examples. Check it out!