HP Energy Conference Highlights
- The ITC industry is responsible for 3% of worldwide total carbon emissions
- It has the ability to affect and lower the other 97%
- ‘Smart’ buildings, hospitals, cities, etc are mainly about the digitisation of analogue process
- Cloud and centralisation often results in environmental responsibility moving from consumer to producer
- Not just the total – but type of – electricity production is important
- HP demonstrates good practices internally and externally, but still has challenges as the world’s largest computer brand
HP’s Save Your Energy Event
We were lucky enough to be invited to HP’s conference on energy efficiency n Somerset House London last week in which a group of analysts and journalists were regaled by panel discussions involving HP and its partners. HP was keen to refer to its use of free air-cooling at Wynyard and its Ecopod container-based data centre with strong energy saving credentials. We also heard about various ‘Smart’ city, transportation and grid examples. We thought it was a good time to look at the broad consequences of energy efficiency, digitisation and social responsibility raised.
Improving Energy Efficiency Is Vital For ITC Equipment
You don’t need to want to save the planet to sign up for more energy efficient devices. The price of electricity is rising steeply, while supply is getting more restricted. Chip, server and storage suppliers aim to give us the best price/performance/Watt, allowing us to do much more for less over time. Intel, for instance, claims that its chip performance has increased 35 fold in he last 6 years along with a 60% improvement in efficiency. Unfortunately this has bad environmental consequences due to the virtually unlimited demand for processing not only in
- a) the digitisation of analogue processes, but also
- b) the open ended scalability of social networking data
There are few data centres in the world which would deliberately unload their racks, while the very success of Public Cloud vendors is judge purely by the number of users and their interactions. Formula 1 is an exception, where the governing body has restricted the number of hours CFD applications can run. We discovered that Renault Lotus as a result has installed a new HP HPC system running less MFOPS, but improving the efficiency of its software applications. This is something we may all have to do when the power runs down I future and the challenges organisations face post-Great earthquake in Japan and in California where Pacific oil and Gas doesn’t have enough spare capacity to introduce large new data centres.
Centralisation And Digitisation Moves Responsibility From Consumer To Producer
As consumers few of us think about the environmental impact of social media. It may be true that each Google search or Twitter message uses little energy, but added together these account for the equivalent of many millions of kettles we didn’t need to boil. However the real issue is the movement of social responsibility from consumer to producer. I don’t want to run an electric car if it uses massive amounts of water and releases huge amounts of carbon when manufactured – even less if my electricity is powered by fossil fuel. Governments are failing us if they don’t invest our money to replace coal and gas power generation with alternative resources: also if they push inadequate alternatives like wind and solar. Encouraging voters through subsidies in these is just pandering to their own political correctness, if they don’t do something real about adopting nuclear, geothermal or bio-fuel.
As users become content-viewers rather than producers, so their suppliers need to take on their environmental requirements along with their apps. Of course this is made far harder where the supplier’s customer is separated from its users. Since Google for instance gets 97% of its revenues from advertising we should investigate the efficiency and environmental impact of its campaigns rather than just the cost of user access.
For existing computing environments environmentalists need to think about jettisoning superfluous applications, concentrate on improving software efficiency rather than just equipment density, consider the carbon costs of manufacturing and pus their governments to invest in large scale alternative to fossil fuel electricity production.
Digitisation and Smarter X Will Dramatically Increase ITC Usage And Its Environmental Impact
While it would be realistic to reduce the overall power demands of existing computing, its scale is bound to grow from the 3% it currently stands at. HP’s argument is that, if applied responsibly, IT has the ability to affect and reduce emissions from non-IT sectors. A number of suppliers such as HP, IBM, DT and Cisco are participating in major projects to digitise previously analogue processes at the building, transportation and city levels. The use of the word ‘Smart’ has extended from its first use by IBM in ‘Smarter Planet’ to become a generic term describing these projects. Typically the proposition is to provide better information through metering and monitoring, enabling organisations to control and make significant improvements in their (previously) analogue processes.
We may be able to improve the utilisation of buses through smart ticketing and GPS tracking and other techniques, but it’s a gamble to suggest a smarter transport system will be more environmentally sustainable. Moscow once ran its entire bus timetabling on a Commodore 64 home micro, smarter cities will be engaged in handling vast amounts of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data, introducing carbon consequences for computing for the first time as a result. Adding these new workloads shows that we’re deliberately computerising processes, increasing ITC’s overall energy usage. Oxford City Council is very pleased with itself about adopting new greener engines in its fleet of buses, but has never addressed the carbon cost of their manufacture publicly.
Some Conclusions – HP Has Great Corporate And Social Responsibility Credentials
As the world’s largest producer of peripherals, PCs and servers HP has taken on the responsibility of constantly improving the energy efficiency of the products, as well as the environmental issues of manufacturing – even though these are now almost entirely outsourced to contract manufacturers. As it builds cloud services, so its experiments with fresh air and other cooling techniques will help it to reassure those consumers who will give up their own environmental choices in how to run some of their systems.
We can’t help thinking that the issues of energy efficiency and CSR will become increasingly separated, as higher and more restricted supply makes the former more essential and the practical world of the new recession reduces the importance of the latter.
If you’re an environmentally conscious user involved with ‘Smart’ projects or are a massive user of social media, you need to think harder than before to make sure CSR and sustainability issues are being adequately addressed.