A recent study has concluded that the IT sector has reduced annual CO2 emissions associated with IT equipment by more than 32 million metric tons worldwide since 2007.
The report, which is here, was conducted by Natural Logic to assess the progress of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative’s (CSCI). The organisation was set up in 2007 and is led by CSC, Dell, Google Inc., HP, Intel, Microsoft and the World Wildlife Fund, but now has a total of 645 members. It’s aim is to reduce the environmental impact of IT equipment through energy efficiency, with a goal of reducing annual CO2 emissions from the IT sector by 54 million metric tons by June 2011.
The research shows that annual CO2 emissions from IT equipment have decreased by 32 million to 36 million metric tons worldwide since 2007 and is on target to achieve the CSCI’s reduction goal by the end of its 2010 fiscal year in June 2011. The report puts the success down to the CSCI’s efforts to promote the adoption of power management, new IT efficiency standards and the use of higher-efficiency computing equipment.
The CSCI has said that in the future it will expand its focus to include commercial and home networking equipment, helped by new board members Cisco, Emerson Network Power and Juniper Networks. The organisation will set new energy efficiency criteria for networking technologies and network devices will be included in the organisation’s environmental targets, with the goal of reducing annual CO2 emissions by an additional 38 million metric tons by 2015.
There’s an interesting comment in the conclusion that in fact the use of PC power management has been much lower than the organisation estimated when it set its goals; “CSCI’s original estimate was based on an assumption that the use of power management features on desktops and notebooks would be in the range of 90% by the end of the 2010 program year, but the latest research shows it is only around 10% (22% at the most)”. So it looks like there will be a particular effort by these companies to push power management in the coming months.
© The Green IT Review (www.thegreenitreport.com)
