Serendipity

Fabio sent me some pointers to upcoming conferences on IT and climate change:

• 6th ITU Symposium on ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change, Accra, Ghana, July 7-8, 2011;
• 2nd IEEE International Green Computing Conference (IGCC’2011), Orlando, Florida, July 25-28, 2011;
• International Conference on Green Computing (ICGREEN’2011), Sofia, Bulgaria, July 25-27, 2011;
• 1st International Conference on ICT as Key Technology for the Fight against Global Warming (ICT-GLOW 2011), Toulouse, France, August 29 – September 2, 2011;

Pity that two of them coincide! I guess this complements my earlier post on readings in Green IT.

Here’s a competition run by the International Telecoms Union (ITU) for a concept paper for a green ICT Application. Prize is $10,000. Deadline June 17. Go for it!

(h/t to Aby for this!)

I’m just collecting some readings for my grad course next week, for which the topic is Green IT. Here’s what I came up with:

• Murugesan, “Harnessing Green IT: Principles and Practices“
• the GeSI report, “Using ICTs to Tackle Climate Change“
• Barroso and Holzle “The case for energy-proportional computing“
• the WWF report “From Green IT to Greening with IT“
• Pamlin and Szomolányi, “Saving Climate at the Speed of Light“
• The Climate Group “Smart 2020 report“

Murugesan seems to give the best overview, although I also like the case studies in the GeSI report. The latter is dated November 2010, so it’s pretty much up to date.

The WWF report makes the important point that as the energy consumption of computers only make up about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the potential for incremental solutions that focus on more energy efficient computing are relatively small, while the potential for emissions reduction by applying smart IT solutions to other sectors (e.g. reducing the need for travel, smart buildings, dematerialization) is much greater. Hence the suggested shift in terminology, from “Green IT” to “Greening with IT”.

Which brings me to another plug for Bill Tomlinson’s excellent book, “Greening through IT“, which I ought to get around to reviewing properly…

I was talking with my students about Passive Houses last week, which are designed to be so well insulated that they require no heating system – just the body heat from a few people will do (think of it as the principle of a four-season sleeping bag, applied to the whole house).

But I hadn’t realised that they’re starting to catch on in North America, and even that they’ll work in places like Minnesota…

Jono sent me a fascinating article in the NY Times about the new zero-carbon office building at the National Renewable Energy Lab, in Golden, Colorado. We visited NREL with the kids back in November, as it has a small, but fascinating visitors centre (but we didn’t get to see the new building, unfortunately).

The part in the article that got Jono’s attention is the 65-watt budget allocated to each workspace, including lighting and computing. Meeting that is certainly possible, but requires some careful choices about which computers to use, and how they are configured. Which then creates interesting new dependencies between the computers we use and the buildings in which we work. I’d love to see more details from NREL about how they handled the social dynamics involved in these design decisions.