Don't be too cynical about Climate Savers

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 14 June 2007 16:00

IT Industry - Strategy

As I recently observed elsewhere, IT marketers are getting on the green bandwagon. It's easy to be cynical and just regard it as self-serving, but I think that's doing the industry an injustice.

Look at what's happening with transport. Newly affluent people in places such as China and India are buying cars for the first time. You can argue that it would be better if such countries avoided the mistakes made by most developed countries and put in a really good public transport system instead, but that's not what's happening and so we (as in the human race) really need those cars to be as clean running and fuel efficient as possible.

If the efforts of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative mean we can have 50 percent more computers running on the same total amount of energy, then that's better than 50 percent more computers using 50 percent more energy.

It's very hard to say to the citizens of countries experiencing significant economic growth that they can't have the things we've come to take for granted unless there's something better on offer - such as the way some countries effectively skipped the widespread use of fixed-line phones and went straight to mobiles.

It makes sense to go for the low hanging fruit first. If you can save around one-third of the energy consumption of a PC just by some simple changes to the design of the power supply, that seems a pretty good place to start. It'll take a few years to work through the entire fleet, but the sooner we start, the sooner we'll get there.

The same sort of reasoning applies in other areas. If you can significantly reduce overall costs and energy consumption by consolidating and virtualising the desktop systems of perhaps 80 percent of your users, progressively replacing ageing PCs with thin clients, maybe that's the way to go. If the other 20 percent still need a traditional PC, you've still achieved an improvement.

In the mean time, some of the biggest savings could be made simply by encouraging staff to turn computers and monitors off (or at least taking advantage of standby modes) at the end of each day. If a PC is only turned on for 10 hours a day rather than 24, that's a sure-fire saving. And there's no chance of it being stymied by a short-sighted accountant or purchasing officer that only looks at the purchase cost of new equipment.