This week....

we've been down to London for the BCS Member Groups convention, this is a bi yearly event where committee memebers find out what other specialist and member groups have been up to, what they intend to be up to etc.
It was good to see that the BCS will be promoting sustainable IT throughout the year, we already do quite a lot, with our Green IT qualifications (Foundation & EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres) and the CEEDA award, but as a committee member on both the Green IT and DC specialist groups I can assure you all that exciting things are in the pipeline, not least the BCS Innovative use of recycling equipment competition. I'll provide the links for all the above projects towards the end of the article!.
On Thursday I was at the National Grid HQ for a "carbon budgeting" presentation organised by the Mayday Network, this was basically how the National Grid allocate carbon and energy consumption mitigation activities across all of their business units, very interesting stuff, for instance the NG use an internal "carbon price" applied to all their capital and operational activities to check that purchases offer "value for.." both financially and socially. What was very interesting is that they have no extra pot of money for energy and carbon mitigation projects, all funding has to come from savings made within the BU's, effectively a "spend to save" concept but can be spread across a number of years.
Another interesting fact is that the senior management team are "bonused" on their business unit performance, its not much at just  5%, but it seems to underline the notion that with any energy saving or sustainable project, senior management must be supportive, if not driving the agenda. We try and deal with very senior personnel when we deal with clients, as it really is the only way to get all the warring factions together to deal with the issue.
Today we've been to see a potential client in Stratford and hope to get two projects off the ground with them, watch this space.

We've been asked whether we're a Energy Monitoring Equipment Supplier Company or an IT consultancy, well we're both but let me enlarge on the detail.

Carbon3IT Ltd is a sustainable IT consultancy, primarily assisting clients to reduce their IT energy bills, but its more wide reaching than that.

We recognise the three main areas in Green IT to be:

Manfacturing of Equipment
Use
Disposal

Now, we do not manufacture computing equipment so we're kind of restricted in what we can acheive except to promote energy saving computing equipment and badger the likes of IBM/HP/DELL etc to design computers that are sustainable in terms of resources use and energy consumed both in manufacture and in use, we try to do this all the time and we promote the use of low energy low carbon computing equipment from Very PC Ltd, a UK company based in Sheffield.

We feel that no one can tell us exactly how much energy their organisation and their IT department is consuming unless they are measuring and monitoring their consumption. As energy monitoring is a relatively new field of expertise we provide the tools for companies to measure and monitor. Our products here are the Greentrac PC power monitoring and management tool and the Enisitic Energy Guardian and other smart metering solutions.
These tools tell us accurately how much energy your IT estate is using, and more importantly provides us with the raw information that we can process to identify where energy savings can be made.
Greentrac in particular tracks energy consumption by user and pc, and can identify those periods throughout the working day where the equipment is on, but idle, we target the idle time by either putting equipment into standby mode or by getting the user to turn the machine off, we also have ad hoc power profiles that will turn PC's off if they are in the right group, the right policy and have the right profile, this is ideal for multiuser PC's, call centre environments or public computers in Librarys or Universitys etc.
This software suite also manages printers, can integrate with IP enabled smart meters (like energy guardian) and provides lifecyle analysis (which PC in your estate is the most energy efficient!) it also links in with access cards and smart phones ( Text's will be sent to telephones that move outside of a proximity range when IT equipment is left on)

As for old equipment that may be donated to charity or sent to landfill we have two options, the first is to use a computer recycling company that is fully compliant with the necessary legislation or the use of software that converts the PC into a thin client, thus reducing wear and tear on components and shifting the processing to a cloud server or virtual server, thus extending its life for a few more years beyond its warranty period.

But we also feel that there is a great deal of waste within the way that IT is delivered, but that is a story for a new blog.


The links to the BCS stuff as promised:

BCS Green IT
BCS CEEDA Award
BCS Green IT "Innovative Use of Recycling Equipment" Competition