Impact of Computers on the Environment

Most of my blog is about how information systems can enhance and transform environmental sustainability throughout the enterprise. It’s about using the Internet, PCs,  iPhone apps., carbon tracking software, information visualization, etc., to green organizations and improve the natural environment. 
Computers themselves, however, have an impact on the environment in terms of energy use, disposal, etc. A volume [...]

IT as Hero and Villain

“A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON GREEN IT ATTITUDE AND ACTIONS AMONG AUSTRALIAN IT PROFESSIONALS,” by ALEMAYEHU MOLLA with VANESSA COOPER, HEPU DENG, STAS LUKAITIS, 2009.

Green IT @ Sun

Mark Monroe, Director of Sustainable Computing at Sun, talks about green products and services in this podcast. About halfway in, Mark discusses power management software, and the need to start thinking about things like whether an email server really needs to be operating at full capacity 24X7. Another interesting thread is about customer awareness of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]