Sizing the Opportunity for IT to Cut Carbon Emissions

A recent McKinsey report, How IT can cut carbon emissions, reported that the carbon footprint associated with IT, including laptops and PCs, data centers and computing networks, mobile phones, and telecommunications networks, could make them among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters by 2020. IT now accounts for 0.86 metric gigatons of emissions a year, or about 2 percent of the emissions added to the atmosphere globally. However, the McKinsey report predicted that the increasing need for IT could significantly drive up that figure.  They write, “by 2020, they (IT) will account for about 3 percent of all emissions: 1.54 metric gigatons, or twice what the United Kingdom produces today.” The report adds that, “the adoption and use of information and communications technologies in China, India, and other developing economies will account for much of this growth.”

As a Baylor alum I recently had a chance to attend a BBN talk with HP's CEO Mark Hurd, and he put it in an interesting light. Our hunger for accessing, using and storing data is increasing exponentially every year - and it is moving faster than Moore's law - the exponential increase in how much data our processing systems can effectively manage. That puts a lot of attention on innovating to reduce heat in high-powered processors, and the energy consumption associated with trying to keep it down. We will need to continue to innovate in reducing the energy cost of all of that data in the data center with more efficient systems.

On the good news side the McKinsey report said that there is the potential for IT products to help abate far more emissions in the general economy than their own production and use generates. The authors looked at things like smarter use of energy in buildings and greater efficiency in motors used in manufacturing. However, they also studied the possibility of reducing emissions by “dematerializing” physical goods and processes through telecommuting, video conferencing, Internet shopping, and downloading content rather than physical objects using paper, CDs, DVDs and found that there are great opportunities here also.  They concluded that information and communications technologies that promote abatement will “create attractive growth opportunities for those companies.”

This is good news as Virtualization (another way to say dematerializing) is a major opportunity for SOA to help with the global warming crisis. We have written about the opportunities for greater business efficiency with virtualization (e.g., Outlook Interview Part Four: Virtualization and Testing and  Can Virtual Environments take Performance & Load Testing?  This all leads to energy efficiency as less power is used by factors of ten or more when you can virtualize aspects of testing and validation. Here is another positive impact that may increase market demand for more environmentally friendly technologies.  Joe McKendrick recently discussed the cost saving side of SOA in his post, Service Oriented Architecture on $10 a day, and how it might do well in today's down economy. "Web services were forged in the dot-com era, but were, quite simply, pressed into service as a very low-cost way to work around very complex integration projects with reusable code."

Joe goes on to provide some good advice on SOA in a down market. This all can start by starting “with the smallest business process you can find that is the most inefficient, where the inefficiency is caused by an aspect of continuous change (a lack of agility) and the business is nevertheless forced to continue to invest in that inefficient business process.”

Of course all of this is an adjunct to the things we can personally do to reduce environmental impact. Especially in business - companies are now more compatible than ever with telecommuting, and "virtual meetings" which can have a dramatic impact on our carbon footprint.