Green economics?
- Article 71 of 77
- Information Age, June 2005
Environmentally conscious IT policies can be good for both the planet and the bottom line.
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Save the world. Although sometimes it might seem like it, that job is not usually high on most CIOs’ priority list. What is usually pretty high up is “save money” and that, surprisingly, is where the two coincide, because it is now possible for organisations to deploy environmentally friendly technologies and practices that will either save money or boost IT’s budget.
“Green IT” has experienced fluctuating popularity in the UK. A poll in 1993, the heyday of green consciousness, by printer manufacturer Kyocera Mita found that while most organisations and indeed CIOs thought that being environmentally friendly was a laudable ambition, “most day-to-day support activities are carried out in the business world without paying any attention to the environmental consequences”. In other words, while being green was a nice idea, putting it into practice was another matter.
Even for right-thinking CIOs, it hasn’t been easy to find best practice advice on purchases and processes. Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and even the government’s own Carbon Trust Foundation are unable to supply guidelines on environmentally friendly IT policies when asked. Industry analysts are no better, with stalwarts such as Gartner and Forrester left pointing to isolated pieces of research at best.
Nevertheless, anyone who wants to develop a green IT policy can start with the basic principles that apply to all green-thinking: use as few resources as possible; and produce as little waste as possible. From these, the cost savings available from a green IT policy become more obvious: resources cost money to obtain, so using fewer saves money. Waste costs money to dispose of, so producing less saves money.
With any IT hardware purchase, there are a huge range of resources used. A PC, server or peripheral requires a large amount of raw materials to manufacture. A single PC, for example, requires five hundred pounds of fossil fuels, fifty pounds of chemicals, and more than a ton and a half of water to produce. It also requires electricity to run during its whole lifespan: at boot time, it may require 100W; when relatively idle but with the screen on, 50W; when in sleep mode, between 3W and 15W. Running flat out, 24/7, at roughly 5p/kWh, a PC could cost an organisation £43 per year in electricity costs. Similarly, a CRT monitor will typically draw 100W or more in power when switched on (compared with 30-60W for an LCD monitor; LCD monitors also have far fewer hazardous materials in them, making them easier to dispose of). There is also the additional cost of the extra air conditioning needed to keep the office cool if there are a large number of PCs.
From more standard IT perspectives, PCs also cost money to buy, manage, repair and store or dispose of when they reach the end of their lifecycle, which is now only two years, according to Gartner Research.
The ‘greenest’ option is to get rid of PCs altogether, but a far more practical choice is use thin client devices instead. These run most applications on a server, with the client just a window onto the server’s activities. As such, they usually don’t require powerful processors, hard drives, large amounts of memory, PCI cards or other standard PC components.
David Angwin, senior regional marketing manager at Wyse Technology, explains the advantages as he sees them. “From a green perspective, there are really three areas where thin clients excel. Because they have no moving parts, they have a very low power consumption. They produce less heat as a result, which means you can have many thin clients in a room without needing air conditioning. They also last longer.”
A typical thin client will only usually draw about 5.6W, even when used all day, at a cost of roughly £2 per year in electricity charges. Its usual lifespan is five years, instead of two years, with a mean time to failure of over 175,000 hours compared to 25,000 hours for PC. It is also usually cheaper than a PC, costing £140 or more. Since all the applications run on the server, a thin-client environment is also far easier to manage and provides a lower total cost of ownership than even the most well managed PC environment, according to Gartner.
Thin clients aren’t practical for all situations, particularly in organisations with many power users. By adopting certain policies, the cost of PCs to the environment – and the IT budget – can be reduced. Switching monitors and PCs off at night can save companies so much money in electricity costs, it could even be worth hiring people purely to go round the company each night doing just that. Buying higher-specced PCs initially will increase their lifetime and reduce the amount of waste the organisation produces. Enabling power management settings will save considerable power, and turning off screensavers will do likewise – a monitor displaying a screensaver will use potentially 25 times as much power as a monitor that’s in standby mode.
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