A pilot program conducted at Microsoft’s Seattle campus has shown that intelligent building solutions using cloud-based software can be achieved with 10% of a building’s annual energy expenditure, offering a ROI period of 18 months.

The program was implemented in 13 of Microsoft’s 118 buildings on its campus, and carried out by Microsoft, Accenture and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
According to a white paper published by the firms on the results of the pilot, the system added an analytical layer on top of existing building management systems, to improve efficiencies in fault detection, alarm management, and energy management. The system works by allowing building engineers to quickly identify problems and potential glitches instead of being reactive, while allow them to optimise performance and define usage and load parameters over time.

The result is savings in the range of several million US dollars, the white paper said.

“What we learned from the pilot program (and which is detailed in the paper) is that we at Microsoft (and by extension, many organizations with real estate portfolios) don’t need to undertake capital-intensive retrofits to cut building energy costs,” wrote Josh Henretig in the official blog from Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability team. “Instead, we saw buildings become dramatically more efficient by introducing software to harness and utilize the building systems already in use. By integrating powerful analytics that add intelligence to existing building infrastructure, our buildings got smarter, more efficient and less costly to operate.”

Excepts from the paper:

In its initial stage, the program addresses energy consumption and cost in three specific ways:

• Fault detection and diagnosis to enable timely and targeted interventions in cases of faulty or under-performing building equipment.

• Alarm management to prioritize the many notifications generated by existing building systems and point engineers to the most impactful issues.

• Energy management through systematic tracking and optimization of building energy consumption and performance over time, while changing the behavior of building occupants with visual dashboards and benchmarks.

How can others replicate this:

Microsoft’s pilot program demonstrates how corporate real estate organizations can collaborate successfully with IT, putting smart building technology to use in cutting costs and securing environmental benefits. Its experience has helped define a set of key design principles that can be used in any such rollout. These are outlined in more detail in this report, in summary they include:

• Identify, collect and aggregate relevant data: This involves setting up automated aggregation of building, weather, utility and organizational data from building systems and other sources to feed into the smart building solution. Cloud computing, combined with on-site building management technology, can provide a powerful platform to gather, store, exchange, and process diverse datasets in a secure and scalable way.

• Employ industry-leading analytics to identify savings: The core of the smart building solution is the analytics engine consisting of rules and algorithms that identify and prioritize interventions to maximize savings. Vendors differ in their approaches
and capabilities and should thus be evaluated thoroughly.

• Present results in a consumable and actionable form: The user experience needs to strike the right balance between ease of use and flexibility. Solutions need to improve
an engineer’s day-to-day productivity with better real-time information and access to data, while also providing a strong toolset for deeper analysis.

• Centralize monitoring operations: A centralized operations center can effectively monitor building conditions across a campus or multi-site portfolio and communicate directly with building engineers.

• Engage the organization: Greater awareness of energy use and benchmarks, displayed via dashboards on the intranet or in hallways, can encourage employees and business leaders to save energy, reducing overall demand.

• Avoid disruptive change: Existing building management systems do not need to be replaced. By deploying an analytics layer on top of these systems, prior investments can be significantly enhanced with minimal capital expenditure. Engineers can adopt new tools while still working directly with more familiar systems. Strong cross- organizational project management and a tailored change management approach are key to success.

The sugarcane used is this plant plastic is a rapidly renewable agricultural crop and replaces nearly a third of the fossil fuels traditionally used in this accessory packaging with material made from plants.

The adoption of the new plastic is part of AT&T’s broader overall commitment to minimize its environmental impact. In March of 2010 the company announced its plans to slim down their accessory packaging; in 2010 and 2011, the company eliminated the use of over 500 tons of paper and plastic in that packaging.

The new packaging is expected to hit AT&T stores by 2 October 2011.

“As a company we are committed to minimizing our own environmental impact, and we see the introduction of this plant-based plastic as an important step in the right direction,” said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president for devices, AT&T. “We are excited to be the first U.S. telecom company to use this plastic in our packaging and we hope other companies will join us in finding ways to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. We are actively working with our accessory suppliers to incorporate both less packaging and more sustainable plastic and paper.”

The first ever ITU Green Standards Week, head in early September, held a particular emphasis on a globalised methodology for assessing the environmental impact of ICTs globally.

“ITU has been working with industry and government members aiming to achieve agreement on an internationally recognized set of methodologies to be approved by the end of the year. Included is a methodology which ICT companies can use to measure their own carbon footprint, as well as a way to estimate the considerable savings in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy that can be achieved in other sectors through the use of ICTs,” ITU said. “A single global methodology will give credibility to the various claims currently being made about the benefits of ICTs in addressing climate change and energy issues.”

Other topics discussed at the event include reducing e-waste and the use of submarine cables for climate change monitoring and disaster warning.

Green Standards Week, jointly organized by ITU and the Italian Ministry for Economic Development, and hosted by Telecom Italia, took place in Rome 5 to 9 September 2011. The event was also supported by Huawei, Research In Motion, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, VRM Italy and Microsoft. The goal was to raise awareness on the role of ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and in particular how standards can help to achieve this.

The body of the talks comprised three workshops: Methodologies for Environmental Impact Assessment of ICT, jointly organized with the European Commission; and Moving to a Green Economy through ICT Standards, jointly organized with Telecom Italia. The third workshop, Submarine Cables for Ocean/Climate Monitoring and Disaster Warning: Science, Engineering, Business and Law was organized with WMO and UNESCO and proposed the use of submarine communication cables for ocean and climate monitoring and disaster warning. For more information, see ITU’s Technology Watch report. Workshop participants called on ITU, UNESCO and WMO to establish and coordinate a joint task force composed of world renowned experts from science, engineering, business and law to intensify study on the use of submarine networks and to explore engineering and business potential in this realm.

The annual ranking of publicly-listed companies based on their investment return and sustainable performance combines evaluations from the Dow Jones Global Total Stock Market and corporate sustainability assessment conducted by sustainability investing firm, SAM.

In addition to laying out the leaders in corporate sustainability, SAM also identifies the leaders of 19 “Supersectors,’ which represents a higher level categorisation of the 57 standard sectors identified by the Index.

KT Corp. was named the 2011 leader for the Telecommunications Supersector, which includes the sectors, mobile telecoms and fixed line telecoms.

“The company’s outperformance in the environmental dimension derives from its comprehensive strategy to address the implications of climate change and its well-developed environmental resource management,” a DJSI profile of the company noted. “KT Corp. has shown a well-defined brand strategy in the economic dimension by comprehensively incorporating its stakeholders’ brand perception in the management process. Moreover, it has enhanced its efficiency regarding capital expenditure and has achieved repeated excellent performance in risk and crisis management and privacy protection. KT Corp. recognizes the value of its human capital through an advanced management system. The company takes responsibility for the social impacts of telecommunication services and proactively engages with stakeholders regarding issues of their concern.”

Fellow Korean firm, Samsung Electronics was named the leader in the Technology Supersector, which includes the software, computer services & Internet, communication technology, semiconductors, computer hardware & electronic office equipment.

“Samsung Electronics’ policy to put sustainability at the heart of all its operations earned it the position of technology industry’s sustainability leader for the year 2011. Sustainable innovation is promoted across all business units by using an eco-design process and an Eco Rating System,” according to SAM Research. “The company has formed Councils focusing on initiatives such as eco-products development, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, water quality control and waste management. Product resource efficiency is promoted through global take-back and recycling programs. Samsung strives to keep a responsible supply chain and has an Eco Partner Certification Scheme. It evaluates suppliers’ environmental management systems and also checks for the use of restricted hazardous substances in parts and raw materials. In 2011, the company announced the “Samsung Eco-Management Vision 2020”, which includes an investment plan of KRW 23 trillion in green businesses including solar cells, rechargeable batteries for vehicles, smart grids, and geothermal heating/cooling units by the year 2020.”

HP out, Schneider Electric in

The latest review of the DJSI was released this month and saw 41 new companies added to, and 23 firms deleted from, the Index.

New additions in the tech sector include energy management and systems company, Schneider Electric. On the other side of the coin, tech-giant HP will be deleted from the Index. DJSI did not explain why HP will be removed from the list.

“In spite of the current economic turmoil, it’s clear that sustainability remains a high priority on corporate and investor agendas,” said Michael Baldinger, CEO at SAM. “Through the DJSI, we are pleased to provide access to a benchmark that offers investors exposure to sustainability leaders in each sector around the world, while also enabling them to create innovative passive and structured products.”

According to Google, it recorded a total of 1,457,982 metric tons of CO2 equivalent for the year 2010. This includes 11,126 metric tons of CO2e for direct emissions (Scope 1) from cars, company shuttles, onsite fuel consumption at its offices, 1,226,350 metric tons of CO2e of emissions from purchased electricity (Scope 2), and 207,065 metric tons of CO2e from other indirect emissions (Scope 3) such as business travel, commuting, manufacturing its servers, building its data centres, and consumption by leased premises. The overall figure also includes 13,441 metric tons of CO2e from a new category – Biogenic emissions, from landfill gas combustions.

Overall, that equals about 1.46 kg of CO2e per user (employee) on an annual basis, Google said. Google adds that without its energy efficiency measures at its data centres, its footprint would have been “about twice as big.”

In addition to the overview of its carbon footprint, Google also gave further details of the energy profile and performance of specific areas of operations.

For example, it says that its data centres now use only 50% of the energy of most other data centres. This, Google says, saves it “millions of dollars in energy costs and cuts our impact on the environment.”

And the savings don’t stop there because Google also buys carbon offsets, in addition to buying and generating renewable energy (30% of Google’s energy in the year 2010 are from renewable sources), so any amount of energy saved, and carbon avoided, also means it needs to buy less carbon offsets to achieve its carbon neutral status.

Another interesting figure from Google is what percentage of global electricity its data centres consume. Based on a study by Standford consulting professor Jonathan Koomey, who estimates the global data centre energy consumption at between 1.1% to 1.5% of the global electricity consumption, Google says that its figures equal only about 1% of the Koomey figure. So 1% of 1.3% (as the average of the Koomey estimate) puts Google’s data centre electricity consumption at 0.01% of the global total, the company said.

CO2 and web searches

Now for the fun part. As part of its carbon disclosure, Google also revealed a very interesting fact – that each 100 web query uses up about 20 grams of CO2. That, according to Google, equals about the same energy as operating a 30W laptop for an hour, keeping a 60W light bulb on for 28 minutes, or the energy needed to produce 1.5 tablespoons of orange juice.

With that figure however, we can now estimated how much CO2 we all use for web searches on a daily, or annual basis.

My calculations as follows:

- 100 searches = 20 g CO2

- Google searches in June 2011 (comScore) = 11.1bn

- 11.1/30 days = 370m Google searches/day

- 370m/100 x 20g = 74 million grams, or 74 metric tons

- 74 metric tons x 365 = 27,010 metric tons a year from Google searches.

So there you have it. The world generates about 74 metric tons of CO2 per day conducting Google searches. On an annual basis, that’s 27,010 metric tons, or roughly one fifth of the CO2 from Google’s purchased electricity.

Applied the same formula to comScore’s total number of web searches in June 2011, and the result is 112 metrics of CO2 per day, or some 40,880 metric tons of CO2 every year.

So what does 40,880 metric tons of CO2 mean?

According to the EPA, that equals the same emissions from about 7,000 passenger cars in a year, about 4 million gallons of gas, and about the same amount of CO2 needed to generate electricity to power 4,500 homes in the US for a year.

Obviously, the figure doesn’t include the energy used by the PCs and increasingly mobile devices that are doing the searching. While coming up with a realistic CO2 profile of the Web is nearly impossible at this point, at least we know have a pretty good idea of the energy profile of one of the more popular components.

Lastly, Google also revealed the CO2 profile of YouTube – 1 minute = 0.1 g, or 3 kg over 3 days. Anyone want to calculate how much CO2 we all use watching videos?

Earlier this month, Dell launched its first infrastructure-as-a-service offering at VMworld, thus offering its customers the option to buy server capacity from the Dell Cloud, instead of actually buying the equipment and installing them by themselves.

A lot of thought has gone into Dell Cloud. For example, customers can acquire their server resources on a pay-as-you-go, reserved, or dedicated basis, effectively giving corporations the flexibility to either source new requirements from Dell as needed, or, in the case of dedicated servers, build a private cloud inside Dell’s facility.

At the same time, Dell’s partnership with VMware also means that applications running inside corporate environments – as long as they are running on VMware’s vSphere and vBlock platforms – can be ported back and forth to create a seamless compute environment. Dell is also preparing cloud offerings on Microsoft’s Windows Azure, as well as OpenStack platforms for the same purpose.

The move basically turns Dell’s traditional business model on its head. Instead of shifting boxes, it is now selling compute cycles. Obviously, the industry as a whole will benefit from the carbon savings of cloud computing. For Dell however, it means it will now be running those servers, and the energy consumed will now register in Dell’s carbon footprint.

So it should come as no surprise that Trisa Thompson, vice president, Corporate Responsibility at Dell, is looking to update the company’s environmental strategy.

“Dell has evolved into a comprehensive technology services and solutions provider. Our organization and capabilities are growing, organically and via acquisitions. Our customers’ needs are evolving too, and we recently announced the building of new data centres around the world to meet their growing IT needs,” she said. “Sustainability priorities and goals we defined several years ago are no longer necessarily the right ones. We are in the process of updating our environmental strategy to reflect Dell’s new business dimensions, and we will be sharing new plans and objectives throughout the coming year.”

Dell’s situation highlights an area that has so far received little attention. As telecoms operators and service providers introduce more and more cloud-based infrastructure and services, very few has actually discussed how they would measure and manage their environmental footprint as they take on their customer’s energy consumption. This will become a more critical factor as government legislation, such as Australia’s recently launched carbon tax law, emerges to put a monetary value [penalties] on corporate emissions.

As of this year, Dell is still focused on its existing environmental strategy, which aims to drive efficiency in five distinct areas – designing, building, shipping, operating, and recycling.

For 2011, the company reported 34,115 metric tons of direct emissions (Scope 1), 404,791 metric tons of indirect emissions (Scope 2), and 112,679 metric tons of emissions from global air travel (Scope 3), according to its 2011 Corporate Responsibility report. While all three figures are higher than the previous two years, Dell’s carbon intensity, calculated as metric tons/million $ revenue came in at 7.14, which beat out last year’s figure of 7.43.

The project, to be implemented for a block of public housing units in Punggol Eco-Town – a former fishing and farming village turned into a green tech test bed by the government, will involve the trial of a number of Panasonic technologies, including rooftop solar panels, lithium-ion battery storage systems, and home energy management systems.

Panasonic’s photovoltaic systems will be installed to supply renewable energy to power common facilities, while its Home Energy Management System (HEMS) will help households monitor and better manage energy consumption via an in-home display (IHD), which are provided as part of the test-bed project. Demand response will be achieved through Panasonic’s Smart Energy Gateway (SEG) which connects the smart meter and home appliances such as air conditioners.

According to Panasonic, the combination of solar and battery storage means that the project has the potential to achieve zero-emission for its common facilities, including lights in public areas, lifts and other shared systems.

The entire installation will be connected to smart meters from Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA), who in turn will take the data and apply it to its ongoing smart grid study, called Intelligent Energy Systems.

The trial is expected to start at the end of the year and be completed by 2013.

Green Standards Week, which is sponsored by Huawei, Research in Motion, Alcatel Lucent and Microsoft, will bring together leading specialists in the field, from top policy-makers to engineers, designers, planners, government officials, regulators, standards experts and others.

The event will consists of a ‘cluster’ of workshops that aims to raise awareness of the importance of using ICT standards to build a green economy and combat climate change.

The event will focus on standard methodologies for measuring the environmental benefits of ICT, with a particular focus on promoting government initiatives for ICTs as part of their climate change policy.

“A High-Level Segment (HLS) will provide Ministers and senior representatives from the ICT industry with an opportunity to exchange views on how ICTs can help in the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the run-up to Durban (COP-17) and in preparation for the Earth Summit Rio +20, to be held in 2012,” the ITU said. “The HLS will aim to set transparent policy objectives and targets to measure and improve government green ICT strategies and standards, including ICT-enabled applications across the economy.”

There are three main workshops to the event.

Workshop 1: methodologies for environmental impact assessment of ICT and the impact of ICTs on climate change, as well as how to standardise the way to calculate the reduction of GHG in ICT operation. This workshop will be jointly organized with the European Commission.

Workshop 2: moving to a green economcy through ICT standards and exploring how ICTs can help to address climate change and build a green economy, and shedding light on standards, policies and best practices. This workshop will be jointly organized with Telecom Italia and will be opened by the Italian Minister of Economic Development, Paolo Romani.

Workshop 3: using submarine communications networks to monitor the climate and provide tsunami warnings. This workshop aims to encourage the development of new technologies and standards and to explore business opportunities for telecommunication companies to become active players in monitoring climate change. This workshop will be jointly organized by ITU, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Dr Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General, ITU: “UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has put sustainability right at the top of the agenda for the United Nations in 2011. One problem we face is that while lip service is paid across the planet to the concept of sustainability, there is still surprisingly little action being taken. The main reason, I believe, is that the economic case for sustainability has not in fact been made convincingly – and here, the ICT sector and standards have a powerful potential role to play.”

ITU Newsroom • Press Release.

The idea is centered around so-called, Data Furnaces, basically, servers, or clusters of servers, that will act as heaters inside homes or buildings.

The researchers note that: “phyiscally, a computer server is a metal box that converts electricity into heat. The temperature of the exhaust air (usually around 40-50 degrees celcius) is too low to regenerate electricity efficiently, but is perfect for heating purposes, including home/building space heating, cloth dryers, water heaters, and agriculture.”

“We propose to replace electric resistive heating elements with silicon heating elements, thereby reducing societal energy footprint by using electricity for heating to also perform computation,” a research paper called, “The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing,” noted.

There are a couple of dimensions to the idea. First of all is cloud computing and fibre networking, which now enables computer resources to be virtualised, so it is feasible at least to place all these servers remotely inside someone’s home or a commercial facility. The second is the fact that existing data centres generate a huge amount of heat, so they need lots of energy to keep them cool. By adopting a distributed computing architecture, it also distributes the heat, hence not only making that heat available to locations where it might actually be needed, but also reducing the cost of operating data centres.

In a way, the idea is not so much an alternative form of heating, but rather a method to reduce the being “wasted” inside current data centres today. And it isn’t that new an idea. I know of at least one trial by IBM in Europe, which takes the hot water generated by a data centre’s water cooling system to heat a nearby swimming pool.

The new study, however, has done a little more qualitative analysts into the concept. Since IT is estimated to consume 3% of the total US electricity load per year, the report argues that, since home heating already constitutes about 6% of the total US energy usage, by piggy-backing on only half of this energy, the IT industry could double in size without increasing its carbon footprint or its load on the power grid and generation systems.

The authors of the research are proposing three different types of DFs.

A low-cost model featuring older and less energy efficiency (hence hotter) servers and disks for installation in residential homes that piggyback on the users existing broadband connection. While these type of hardware don’t work efficiently in data centres, they are “ideal for providing heat and maintaining basic disk and network operations year-round,” and “supporting delay tolerant batch jobs,” the authors argued.

Another type is so-called, low-bandwidth neighbourhood DFs, which still use existing broadband connections but leverage their proximity to end-users to compensate for the limited bandwidth. “Network latency can be reduced by creating more data centres closer to customers, particularly for cloud applications such as E-mail, multimedia distribution, and low-hit rate Web pages and services that are delay tolerant, embarrassingly distributable, and/or can benefit from large-scale replication and geo-distribution,” the authors wrote.

Perhaps the most viable immediately are eco-friendly urban DFs for commercial complexes, which will be supported by dedicated fibre or leased lines. This type of DF would allow data centre operators to expand into urban areas without having to lease sites, but do present the challenge of having to dissipate heat during summer months, when the heat is not needed. Also, the distributed architecture introduces a different granularity to perform massively distributed computations, like MapReduce, the report said.

The idea has some obvious challenges, as highlighted by the researchers – for example, making sure that DFs don’t break usage policies of existing broadband lines, or ensuring the physical security necessary for data centres. They also have to enable zero-touch management or the maintenance costs would far outweigh any other benefits.

The different deployment models certainly need a lot more work to find the balance between its benefits in providing heat, and its ability to support data processing for operators and end-users, but the concept does present some intriguing possibilities. There really is no reason why server manufacturers and service providers cannot get together and produce a home-type server that would relief some of the load of today’s massively centralised data centres – imagine an Apple TV-like device with server-level processing and storage. And there’s no reason why such a device can’t be integrated with a home heating system.

At the very least, someone should find a way to recycle the heat from existing data centres, especially those inside commercial buildings, into some usable form.

You can download the report here.

“Community leaders often ask ICF if we think their community could be a serious contender for our Intelligent Community Awards program. It is a smart question. Unless their community has a reasonable chance of success, they do not want to invest precious time and resources in completing the nomination form,” the ICF noted.

While I didn’t complete the test, I found the topics and guidelines on what qualifies an intelligent community quite interesting.

According to the ICF, there are five major topics to determine what is an intelligent community, as illustrated below:

Broadband
Household penetration rate • Policies and programs to increase penetration and use

Knowledge Workforce
Educational attainment of citizens • Student-to-PC ratio in schools • Availability of higher education

Innovation
Policies encouraging business startups • Business incubation • Interactivity on municipal Web site • Availability of seed capital, grants and loans

Digital Inclusion
Internet availability • Public-access computers • Digital literacy training for adults

Marketing & Advocacy
Economic development strategy based on information and communications technology • Task force or group devoted to carrying out the strategy