IT industry 'damaging' the environment

Paul Eccleston, Telegraph 3 Dec 07;

The rapidly expanding information and technology industry is having a growing impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, a new report claims.

IT is growing faster than the aviation industry and, with more than a billion computers on the planet, is responsible for around two per cent of man-made CO2 annually, which is on a par with the global airline industry.

An environmental campaign group is now urging the industry to wake up to the environmental impact it is having and adopt better energy policies.

In its report An Inefficient Truth, the charity Global Action Plan calls on the Government to introduce new laws that will force IT companies and users to cut their energy use.

The report claims there are an estimated 10 million office PCs in the UK and 43 per cent of the adult population regularly uses one at work.

IT equipment accounts for about 10 per cent of the country's total efficient electricity use.

As the number of people using computers rises so does the energy consumed by UK organisations.

Information and communications technology (ICT) equipment accounts for about 10 per cent of the UK's total electricity consumption or the output from four nuclear power stations.

The intensive power requirements needed to run and cool data centres now accounts for around a quarter of the IT industry's sector's CO2 emissions.

Between 2000 and 2006, energy consumption from non-domestic ICT equipment increased by more than 70 per cent and is expected to grow a further 40 per cent by 2020.

The Inefficient Truth report said that although computers had helped transform the world they had also greatly increased demand for energy. Because of the fear of power cuts, companies increased storage capacity, operated back-up generators and even duplicated their systems, resulting in an upwardly spiralling cycle of energy consumption.

The use of ICT was growing at a faster rate than the increase in flying but unlike the aviation industry, IT had the opportunity to make energy savings at very little cost.

The report said the link between increased energy consumption of ICT and man-made climate change was clear and cutting energy use now made sense not just environmentally but also as a way of business cutting costs.

Computer servers 'as bad' for climate as SUVs
Catherine Brahic, NewScientist.com news service 3 Dec 07;

Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report.

Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.

"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.
Unknown cost

The group ran a survey of some of the largest businesses in the UK in an attempt to find out how aware the industry is of its carbon footprint.

The survey revealed that more than half of the IT professionals surveyed believed their environmental impact was "significant", however:

• 86% of them do not know the carbon footprint of their activities

• two thirds of the departments they work for are not responsible for paying their own energy bills

• more than half do not even see those bills

The bottom line is that IT departments "are buying lots and lots of kit that they have to run and cool without knowing what the energy cost of that kit is", says Restorick.

The survey also revealed that considerable amounts of electricity could be saved by more efficient data storage: 60% of the departments said they were using less than half their storage capacity and 37% said they are storing data indefinitely.

Restorick told New Scientist that simply increasing the efficiency of energy use and data storage could easily cut 30% of power use in businesses. "In theory, this could happen overnight," he says.
ID cards

Respondents to the survey said they are given few if any incentives to "go green". Global Action Plan is calling on the UK government to review its policies on long-term data storage to take into account the environmental implications and to encourage businesses to only keep the data they need to save.

Restorick points out that policies being pursued by the government have considerable carbon costs. "This government is very keen on individual ID cards," says Restorick. "We would say you should be doing a carbon analysis of putting ID cards into our country – such cards would require data being kept on every single person in the country for an infinite amount of time."

The report is published as a major UN conference about climate change opens in Bali, Indonesia.

From 3 to 14 December, thousands of representatives from governments around the world, NGOs, climate policy makers, researchers, environmental activists, and lobbyists meet in Bali to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto protocol and discuss its progress.