Scientific progress is full of skepticism. Diversity in opinion we see in global warming debate is one example. Scientific process itself is a data driven journey.

Have we established the need for Green Computing as a sure shot way of reducing our climate footprint? Hardly!

All we have achieved is a framework level understanding that we need to do something. Draft scientific model which basically pleads with us that we must adjust our way of life and our way of doing business.

Richard Hawkins, Canada Research Chair in Social Contexts of Technology at University of Calgary, is about to shake conventional green IT thinking – by questioning whether Green IT really reduces our environmental footprint.

Hawkins research report is important. It will help decide how much budget OECD will allocate in IT and Sustainability Initiative – important part of Earth Summit, to be held in Copenhagen.

“It was once assumed that there was little or no material dimension to information technology, thus, it should be clean with minimal environmental impact,” says Hawkins who is also a professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture. “However, we are finding that reality is much more complicated.”

Firstly, Hawkins notes that digital technologies require a lot of energy to manufacture and eventually they create a huge pile of ‘electronic junk’, much of it highly toxic. They also use a lot of energy to run. Some estimates are that they use up roughly the same amount of energy as the world’s air transport system.

He thinks, rightly so in many cases, many vendors are just piling on green bandwagon and indulging in green washing.

Far from denying these environmental implications, Hawkins points out that many IT producers are gearing up to produce ‘greener IT’, using the environmental footprint as a marketing tool. “But probably most of the negative environmental impacts occur in the form of completely unintended, second and third order effects,” he says. “These ‘rebound’ effects may not be mitigated by inventing ‘greener’ IT products and, indeed, may be intensified by such changes.”

He picks on unintended consequences of using mobile phone in explaining rebound phenomena

Rebounds occur when the use of IT contributes to or reinforces an increase in other activities that already have environmental effects.

“For example, technologies such as cell phones actually help us to become hyper-mobile,” he says. “We didn’t adopt the mobile phone so we could drive and talk on the phone, we adopted it because we were already driving so much. Creating a greener cell phone won’t reduce the impact of increased mobility. The real question is what amount of mobility is sustainable?”

Hawkins has a solution which he will be presenting in next month conference.

Hawkins says the problem is not that IT is inherently more or less green than other technologies. The problem is that it has been applied so extensively that its environmental implications—positive as well as negative—are often overlooked. Hawkins and his research team are establishing a more reliable basis for identifying and assessing the contribution of IT to our environmental footprint.

By building a taxonomy rich database of IT’s environmental impact, we can establish clear metrics around positive and negative environmental implications.

At the very least this will stop lot of CIOs from flying blind. This will also prevent them from getting hijacked by green washing propoganda!

[picture taken from UCalgary Website]

Talk about great idea and horrible timing. Economy is weak to say it mildly. Consumers are stretched and companies are scaling back in an unprecedented way. So who cares for new shiny green widget? At the Mobile World Congress, going on in Barcelona, Spain, Nokia and Motorola are showcasing  green mobile handsets.

In a marketplace, which is still divided over the question of cost effectiveness of green technologies, Nokia and Motorola are going in for the gentle hype to establish leadership on clean technology. Nokia has been successfully running recycling campaign for quite some time.

Nokia with 5630 Xpress Music Machine and Motorola with MOTO W233 Renew are reaching out to niche segment. From New York Times:

[Nokia] features include a light sensor that detects natural light, allowing the phone to save energy. Most Nokia phones now beep when they are fully charged, alerting the owner to detach the charger from the wall socket.

Motorola will be displaying its MOTO W233 Renew, which was released this month in the United States. The W233 is made using plastic from recycled water bottles and can itself be entirely recycled. The phone costs $9.99 with a two-year contract and for now can be bought only through T-Mobile. The phone is also sold in packaging made of 100 percent recycled paper and includes a prepaid shipping envelope for buyers to send in their old mobile phone for recycling.

Ericsson’s GreenHeart project is a step in the same direction – project designed more to demonstrate corporate commitment and less driven by revenue objectives:

The GreenHeart™ is a full concept with all life cycle in mind. It includes features such as bio-plastic housings, recycled plastic keypads, zero charger with 3.5mW standby power, HTML based e-manuals, a game style educational application ‘Ecomate’ and environmentally conscious packaging. Once the technology reaches maturity, new techniques and materials will then be included in the portfolio and a market wide launch. One ‘eco’ product by itself will not make a difference but by learning through this concept study we are ensuring the entire portfolio in future will be more sustainable

Apple, with all it’s big claim on general green computing, is yet to make a clean statement on iPhone’s footprint.

What mobile industry needs is a common taxonomy and common  benchmarking framework for mobile handsets. This is essential for companies to procure mobile handsets on cost and energy efficiency basis.

[Picture courtsey NYT]

The year 2009 will be a tipping point for the CFO’s involvement with IT. Large businesses have hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars locked up in their IT organizations including data center facilities, systems assets, and organizational capabilities built over time. In a world where capital is at a premium, CFOs will seek to use IT assets as a lever to generate cash.

There will be different kind of outsourcing deals, requiring financial savviness in deal structuring.

They may sign outsourcing deals that include a bigger financing aspect, such as having IT service providers make a large up-front payment in return for higher margins over the course of a contract. They may sell and lease back hard assets, such as data center facilities. They may place favorable vendor financing at the core of hardware and software purchasing decisions, as many companies in heavy industry do when they buy industrial equipment and as telcos have done for years.

Also CIOs will be asked to give their views on containing cost using idle or existing IT capacity:

Successful CIOs will give the senior-management team practical ideas on how to optimize cash.

As cloud computing and SaaS deployment gains momentum, trend towards data center cost rationalization will be interesting to observe. There are other important comments made by Stefan Spang in the report. Government regulations will play a crucial role. Though not all for the negative reasons. Barack Obama’s commitment to green building and energy efficiency targets will help sector specific CIOs to review their budget allocation. Vendor consolidation is going to be a clear trend this year. CIOs will be busy chasing key personnel from outsourcing partners and making sure business continuity processes are in place. Any vendor flameout and hostile M&A should not affect core business technology processes. CIOs will be very busy this year. If you are pitching to them, use numbers. Pitch using numbers to tie IT goals with bottom-line and top-line will get audience. 15 minutes of pitch time ie.

IBM runs the world’s largest commercial technology infrastructure, with more than 8 million-square feet of data centers in six continents to its name, so if it implements its Green Initiatives in a  planned manner ,it surely will assuage the carbon footprints in  large extents and as a matter of fact it has pretty much succeeded in that.

IBM signed a $3.1 million deal to implement green technologies for Indian financial services company Religare Enterprises Limited. Under the contract, IBM will design, build, and maintain energy-efficient data centers in Delhi, Noida, and Mumbai for REL. It will also deploy networking gear and disaster-recovery systems for the company. The setup, which combines high-density computing with precision air conditioning controls, will cut REL’s energy costs by up to 35% by reducing annual power consumption by 3,600 kilowatt-hours, according to IBM.

IBM to date has built more than 300,000 square feet of raised data center space in India. The company has more than 50,000 employees in the country. The Project Big Green which was launched in 2007 and has outlined a five-step approach to improving energy efficiency is aimed at building and redesigning data centers that consume less energy. The initiative includes a new global “green team” of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM. It has helped more that 2,000 clients develop greener data centers with average energy saving or more than 40 percent and increased the utilization of systems by an average two to four times. Additionally, IBM has recycled more than 1.5 billion pounds of IT equipment since 1996. Also, since from 1990 to 2007 IBM has avoided energy-use-CO2 emissions equivalent to 45 percent of the companies 1990 energy use, saving more than $18 million annually, or more than $310 million in total.With the launch of its second phase of the project, the team from IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) is now targeting large corporate customers in India.

Here is the Lesson that can be learnt FROM IBM’s green Initiatives

and

A CIO’s Guide to Going Green

Watch it:

Takeaway for executives is to emphasize common sense. Save power, do power intensive operations at the right time. Common sense will drive Green IT revolution.

What do you think? Is your company planning to allocate budget for green computing?

“Apple is… guilty of using ‘green’ as a marketing ploy, rather than making green a core part of their business practices,” said Stephen Stokes, vice president of business and climate change at AMR Research Inc.

Determining Apple’s “green-ness” is difficult because much of the information reported to authorities, like the Environmental Protection Agency, is provided voluntarily. Both Apple and its detractors have ample data to make their cases. However, Apple’s recent decision to highlight its environmental efforts leaves the company’s eco-track record open to scrutiny and criticism at a time when green issues are coming to the fore.

Success in promoting its record could help Apple lure more consumers, who are increasingly considering the environmental impact of their choices, to the company’s products. That could help Apple spur sales and its slumping share price, which has fallen 57% so far this year, far worse than Morgan Stanley Technology Index’s 47% drop.

Apple declined to comment for this story, but Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in an October report on Apple’s Web site that his company was committed to developing green practices.

We checked Apple website and found lot of new content targeted to explain environmental impact of all products. You can check Apple and the Environment to read environmental impact of your favorite product.

Here is a sample environmental attributes for Cinema HD Display, 30” flat panel M9179.