Green IT And More (Part III) – Greening Your Organisation
In the third of a series of articles, David Tebbutt explains how IT can help companies become greener by using computers to reduce emissions and other undesirable effects outside of IT
Offsetting: All it’s cracked up to be?
You may be wondering why we haven’t mentioned carbon offsetting as an option to improve an organisation’s environmental performance. Well, a lot of organisations are using carbon offsetting (where you buy an ‘offset’ for the carbon dioxide emissions you produce – usually a payment towards emissions- reducing projects) as a ‘get out of jail free’ card and claiming carbon neutrality because they’re planting a forest or outsourcing their manufacturing. While this is all very well, the projects need to be genuine, authenticated and sustainable, rather than simply shifting the blame, or excusing a lack of action. We suggest that you keep offsetting as a backstop to compensate for those unavoidable emissions that remain after you’ve taken all possible measures to improve your performance in the first place.
IT to the Rescue: Preventing Energy Waste
Although IT devices consume energy, you can use them to control energy, particularly electricity consumption.
You can use IT systems to take care of building management. For example, using movement sensors, thermostats can be adjusted, lights switched on and off, and computers switched off out of hours and reawakened for software upgrades.
One of the biggest challenges in reducing electricity consumption is ensuring that electricity users can monitor their own consumption. What gets measured gets managed – once people are aware of their consumption, they can go about reducing it. This isn’t yet common practice, even in data centres. But, with new smart metering technologies, organisations could monitor the electricity usage of individual departments.
Departments could be charged for usage, giving them a clear incentive to reduce their consumption and the ability to see the benefits of energy-saving initiatives straight away.
Increasingly, organisations are asked by governments and other stakeholders to disclose the amount of energy that they use – and therefore the associated CO2 emissions. IT systems can play a role in enabling organisations to measure and report those emissions. IT systems also enable a greater exchange of environmental information up and down the supply chain.
