The deal basically unified BT’s Global Video Exchange services with Orange Business Services Telepresence Community. The operators will also issue a directory for its customers so they know who and how to contact firms on the other network.

BT and Orange are the latest operators to offer inter-operator TelePresence services. Both are already interconnected to Tata’s global TelePresence portfolio, which includes enterprise users on its own network, that of partners such as Telefornica, as well as some three dozen public rooms with TelePresence systems. BT is also connected to AT&T’s TelePresence network.

The site, which houses the IT infrastructure of almost 500 major international organisations, will now purchase 100% of its energy from UK renewable energy provider, SmartestEnergy.

According to Telehouse, SmartestEnergy buys energy from independent generators from around the country and supplies it to its customers.

The move, according to Tokuji Mitsui, managing director of Telehouse and KDDI Europe, is part of the firm’s strategy to go green.

“The biggest challenge we face at Telehouse is to improve our energy efficiency and reduce our carbon footprint, and in order to support this challenge Telehouse has worked closely with industry leading partners and regulators. We are committed to our environmental responsibilities and continue to work to align our business strategy with our green ethics wherever possible,” he said.

“The majority of electricity supplied to us is utilised by our clients, therefore it is integral that we take on initiatives such as the 100 per cent green energy supply, which in turn benefits our customer’s credentials by reducing their carbon footprint. We intend to roll out this green partnership initiative with SmartestEnergy to all our European sites in the near future.”

What is unclear however is whether the decision to go with renewable energy will cost Telehouse any more than its current cost base, or whether any extra cost will be passed on to its customers.

One of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of renewable energy is the cost, since it typically costs more than conventional grid power. This, according to most industry experts, make renewable energy for large facilities like data centres economical infeasible unless government subsidies are involved – see our story on NTT America’s deployment of renewable energy systems at its California data centre.

Obviously, the press release can be interpreted in another way. Telehouse can source all its energy from SmartestEnergy for its own systems, but leave the choice to its customers to select its own source of power. In face the release makes clear that Telehouse London are awarded the Carbon Trust Standard, which certifies that organisations have measured, managed and reduced its carbon emissions across its OWN operations. It says nothing of the energy source that is used to power the equipment of its customers.

On the other hand, by connected to SmartestEnergy, Telehouse now have the ability to offer its customers access to renewables as well, if it is not doing so already. In fact, many data centre operators and managed hosting providers offer some kind of service for its customers to go greener, including more efficient equipment, renewable energy power, and so on.

According to news report, the same rules will be expanded to 75% of rural towers and 33% of urban powers by 2020.

The move is targeted at reducing the country’s reliance on diesel generators, which currently power about 60% of all sites in the country. If enforced, the new regulations will be first in the world to require mobile operators to deploy renewable energy to power its networks.

Telecoms operators will get some support from the government in the form of the Universal Services Obligation fund. The regulations are not specific to onsite renewable energy systems however, and do not exclude renewable power sourced from India’s burgeoning renewable energy sector.

As part of its statement, the DoT estimates that renewable energy generation makes up about 11% of the country’s entire power base.

As part of its “conquests 2015″ plan, Orange Business has identified cloud computing, M2M, as well as video conferencing, as “priority areas for growth.” What’s interesting is that all of these areas are part green ICT, and represent technologies that should help drive efficiencies in the enterprise, cities, and between people.

Of course, the operator didn’t mentioned the green element as such, but it is cool that a major international telco now sees much of its growth potential in green services.

Here are what Orange Business is setting out to do:

• generating 500 million euros in cloud computing by 2015 by accelerating its developments focusing on four areas: cloud-ready networks, “as a service” infrastructures, “as a service” collaborative solutions and communications, and application stores.
• selling 10 million SIM cards by 2015 on the M2M market (or Internet of Things), capitalizing on: the development of services beyond connectivity, its dedicated international expertise center in Brussels and its role as the driving force for the standardization of the market.
• becoming number 1 for videoconferencing in France and one of the top three worldwide. The guiding principles include: interoperability of terminals and networks, development of managed and hosted solutions, as well as simplification of uses through user support.

Oh, the fourth objective in the list is to generate 1 billion euros in revenues from emerging countries.

“We’ve reached a point in our engineering projects where we’re facing new challenges related to our solar receiver design,” Google wrote in its blog. “At this point, other institutions seem better positioned than Google to take this work to the next level.”

However, all is not loss. True to its originally philosophy of trying to stimulate the renewable energy market, Google will make all that it has learned through the Initiative, namely research into technologies for solar power towers – a system that focuses a field of mirrors on a solar receiver on top of tower, which then captures that heat and turns it into electricity, available to the rest of the industry.

Here’s a video of the Heliostat project

<iframe width=”450″ height=”259″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/C_oRDBda73U” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here’s what Google has learned and is sharing in its own words:

• Smarter controls: In the past, the focus has been on making strong heliostat structures. We learned that using lower cost materials and smarter software controls can generate better performance at a lower cost. This ends up lowering the overall cost of the concentrating solar power system.
• The Brayton engine: Concentrating solar power plants traditionally use significant quantities of water for cooling. This poses a challenge to scaling these technologies, especially in the desert. Our research shows that using a “Brayton engine” — a jet engine that uses solar energy to heat air and does not require spray cooling with water — significantly reduces water use and may reduce operating costs as well.
• A systems approach: We took a system level approach to designing concentrating solar systems. By focusing on the cost and quality of the system as a whole, we tried to make cutbacks on some components, while compensating elsewhere to maintain performance. We believe this approach could reduce the cost of electricity generated by concentrating solar systems, rather than attempting to optimize each individual component, which can drive up overall costs.

The primary driver for the clouds, according to GIA, is factors such as growing prominence of enterprise mobility, need for business continuity, and increasing adoption of cloud strategy among SMEs.

The benefits of cloud computing are earmarked as “radically lower IT costs,” allowing “even smaller companies to piece together an IT project without spending on purchasing legacy server, and storage systems,” and ease from “the burden of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required in running the network.”

“By offering a more cost-effective, less risky, and fundamentally faster alternative to on-site application developments, cloud computing is poised to transform the economics of information technology in the next few years,” GIA said in its release.

GIA continued that cloud computing adoption is being accelerated given the recent economic recession because it can potentially slash IT costs by over 35%.

“The bad economy fed the global cloud computing services market as cash, and revenue starved companies prowled for IT solutions that are cost-effective, require minimum to zero investments, and low management of computing resources. Technically, the feature of multi-tenancy, or the ability to scale up or scale down services on demand, makes fiscal sense in tough economic climate. And with cloud computing fitting the bill in every respect, the business case for the technology stands exemplified. In short, recession became the push factor, which tripped the market into the mass adoption stage.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/11/21/prweb8977106.DTL#ixzz1eW0e71jg

The methodology has also just been included in the ITU’s standard ITU-T L.1410 ‘Methodology for Environmental Impact Assessment of ICT Goods, Networks and Services.’

The GSMA developed its methodology as part of the Mobile Energy Efficiency (MEE) Network Benchmarking service, launched a year ago at Mobile Asia Congress 2010. As a methodology, the MEE Benchmarking service provides detailed analysis of the relative performance of an operator’s network benchmarked against a dataset from anonymised sources. It also ‘normalises’ the data from any operator to a common layer for like-for-like comparison, and provides high level insights to improve energy efficiency. Participants also get to track their energy efficiency progress and get data to demonstrate their successes.

To leverage the results of the MEE Benchmarking service, the GSMA has launched a new service, MEE Optimisation, which undertakes a detailed bottom-up analysis to identify and assess the inefficiencies of a network, to then provide operators with a cost-benefit analysis of specific solutions that can be considered to improve network energy efficiency.

The MEE Optimisation service develops detailed action plans aimed at reducing operators’ energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. To do this, the GSMA partners with third parties such as equipment vendors to deliver the MEE Optimisation service to operators. The GSMA is currently piloting the first MEE Optimisation project and is in discussions with several members about rolling out the service more widely.

The site, to be located in the city of Hohhot, is expected to cost 12 billion yuan, or US$1.9 billion. The operator has already signed a MoU with the regional government for the project, according to chairman of its board, Wang Jianzhou.

One reason cited by the report in the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, is the region’s abundant wind and coal power supply, which ensures supply for the data centre.

The centre will support the operator’s pending roll out of 4G, or TDD-LTE, services in the coming year. China Mobile has more than 630 million subscribers, making it the largest mobile operator in the world by the number of subscribers.

Core to the improvements was the adoption of a solution from Vigilent, an intelligent energy management system firm. NTT America chose Vigilent as its energy management partner after a successful pilot project at a data centre in San Jose. Following the success of the Vigilent system during the pilot project, NTT America extended deployments at both the San Jose and Sterling data centers. The deployments at the two data centers encompassed 178 DX and chilled-water CRACs (Computer Room Air Conditioners), and in total more than 3,000 racks of servers, within 135,000 sq. ft. of floor space.

In addition to direct energy savings, NTT America identified potential indirect financial benefits totalling US$210,000 annually as a result of the Vigilent solution. These include reduced maintenance costs, increased cooling capacity, improved thermal management and deferred capital expenditures.

The system also improved the PUE performance by 10% at the Sterling site and 5% at the San Jose site, and offered a ROI period of under two years, NTT America said.

“We recognize the importance of reducing the amount of energy required to cool the data centers NTT America operates. Equally important is our enterprise customers’ interest in, and support of, energy efficiency both from the environmental and cost reduction avenues. As a key driver for the future of the data center, NTT America will continue to evaluate, support and deploy technologies that can be environmentally sound and cost effective for our customers,” said Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO of NTT America.

According to NTT, the Vigilent system is able to deliver cost saving benefits through dynamic, automated control of extremely complex cooling environments utilizing advanced, artificial intelligence technology. The system employs a wireless mesh network of sensors which provides real-time feedback from tens to thousands of data points throughout the data center to an artificial intelligence engine. The engine incorporates this data, along with thousands of other variables, to dynamically and continually adjust air cooling and flow equipment for maximum efficiency in alignment with changing IT loads, within pre-specified environmental parameters.

The deal is worth more than $100 million and includes Emerson’s portfolio of products, including high-efficiency power systems (Trinergy and ASCO); Liebert precision cooling systems and SmartAisle optimisation; SiteScan infrastructure monitoring and management; and fully integrated, factory-tested modular housing systems. The products are complemented by Emerson’s in-house integration expertise, combining solution engineering, end-to-end project management, global supply chain and logistics, and site civil works (via partnerships with Silcar and Greenbox Architecture).

The solution will power a series of facilities that will serve as equipment hubs, operational depots and training facilities for the NBN.