Measuring IT Energy Use

Jonathan Koomey of the Energy End-Use Forecasting group at LBNL released a report about how much power is consumed by computer servers.

This study estimates total electricity used by servers in the U.S. and the world by combining measured data and estimates of power used by the most popular servers with data on the server [...]

Earth Day

That’s what i’m talkin about!

From the NYTimes: graphical software tools for measuring home energy use tap into patterns of human behavior to lower energy consumption. Seems adaptable to the organizational context.

Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds
Giving people the means to closely monitor and adjust their electricity use lowers their monthly bills and could significantly reduce the need [...]

ZigBee

The ZigBee Alliance is doing interesting things with a new low-power wireless standard based on the mesh concept. One use is for capturing real-time energy consumption patterns, transmitting it wirelessly to databases, and using the information about real-time consumption to enable better energy management. Here’s a deck for more details on ZigBee. Will this take [...]

Why This Blog

Last fall, I read an article about the large amount of energy consumed by computer data centers. The article also talked about new technologies for saving energy by making servers in data centers more efficient (like virtualization). Once I started reading about this stuff I couldn’t stop: save money and save the earth, nice. But [...]

About me

My name is Nigel Melville. I’ve studied electrical and computer engineering and business and economics, worked as a product engineer, and started a software company. Currently I’m a professor of business information technology at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
My research analyzes the mechanisms and consequences of IS innovation within organizations. Information [...]