Green IT

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Energy Star Logo, one of the first Green IT labels

Under Green IT (more rarely, Green ICT ) refers to efforts to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) throughout their entire life cycle to make across the environment and resources. This includes optimizing the consumption of resources during the manufacture, operation and disposal of the devices ( green in IT ).

Another aspect of Green IT is the saving of resources through the use of information technology (IT), for example when business trips are replaced by video conferences ( Green by IT ).

overview

GreenIT encompasses a variety of approaches that address different aspects of the ICT life cycle :

  • Reduction of energy consumption in use
  • Reduction of energy and material consumption in production
  • Reduction of waste heat and pollutant emissions in use and production
  • Reduction of pollutants in the products and in manufacturing processes
  • Reduction of unnecessary printouts in the printer area
  • Recycling and energy-saving disposal
  • Sustainable design of the products and the production of hardware that is as durable as possible ( see also: electronic waste , planned obsolescence )
  • Resource-saving programming of software (Green Software Engineering)
  • Use of IT to reduce the energy consumption of another source (e.g. traffic, heating systems)
  • social and ethical aspects, such as B. healthy and fair working conditions ( fair IT )

For political and image reasons, the operation of IT devices with renewable energies is often considered, such as B. from Greenpeace .

Essential legal standards in the EU are the RoHS directive and the WEEE directive.

history

Green IT began in 1992, when the US EPA launched the Energy Star label; on the other hand, Green IT also has roots in environmental informatics , which deals with the use of IT for environmental purposes employed by IT for environmental protection. The ETH Zurich and the affiliated EMPA institute have been active here since the 1980s.

Green IT gained greater importance from the end of the 2000s due to the rapidly increasing global spread of the Internet and the associated end devices. The topic has long played a role in large Internet companies such as Apple or Facebook, so Apple switched all of its data centers to green electricity at the end of 2014 (see Apple # environmental protection ). Since 2012 there has been the non-profit project Nager IT, which produces the most environmentally friendly fair trade mouse possible, and since 2013 there has been the Fairphone project in Holland , which aims to produce smartphones that are as environmentally friendly as possible.

Application areas in commercial use

Data centers

The new data center of GSI Darmstadt, called Green IT Cube, was inaugurated in 2016

Most of the electricity consumption of ICT in commercial use is made by data centers and servers . In 2008, they consumed 10.1 terawatt hours of electricity in Germany, 1.8 percent of total German consumption, and thus generated around 1.1 billion euros in costs. The energy density of the centers, and thus their cooling requirements, are constantly increasing. Studies forecast an increasing demand for electricity of up to 50% in Germany by 2013 and identify great savings potential through the use of green IT (as of 2008).

Depending on the estimate, an average of up to half of the energy required for the operation of infrastructure such as uninterruptible power supply (UPS) , power distribution , cooling or the like is required. Measures that deal with their optimization are also referred to as DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) solutions . The Power Usage Effectiveness indicator (PUE) provides a rough estimate for assessing the expenses for the infrastructure . In individual cases, however, the energy consumption for the infrastructure can deviate significantly from the average, because various influencing factors, such as high ambient temperatures, limited building space or high security requirements of the data center (if UPSs are available twice, for example) increase this even with the most modern technology. For example, a significantly higher increase in power consumption is forecast for Japan due to the relocation of computing power to large data centers, because the security requirements due to its location in an earthquake area are significantly higher than in Central Europe.

A common guideline is that the servers that run around the clock are only utilized to an average of 10 to 20 percent. The server capacities are usually designed based on the operating peaks, which, however, are rarely reached. One concept moving towards Green IT is consolidation : Here, heterogeneous systems are merged and the number of servers and data centers is reduced. Another option for data centers with better capacity utilization is virtualization . This allows application programs that were previously scattered on different computers to be bundled in virtual machines on powerful computers. The result: servers can be used much more, for example by up to 50 percent.

The virtualization is supported by concepts such as service-oriented architectures (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS). SOA breaks down business processes according to computing power, which means that the necessary resources in data centers can be precisely determined. SaaS relocates application programs from local computers to central high-performance machines and uses the potential for resource sharing there. Modern IT management systems can predict the server capacities actually required and throttle, switch off or switch on the services as required.

Another important aspect of Green IT that offers great potential for optimization is data center cooling. Between 35 and 50 percent of a data center's total energy costs are spent on cooling. However, by modernizing measurement and cooling technology as well as structural measures (e.g. arrangement in hot and cold aisles, modular structure of the cooling technology), this proportion can be reduced significantly.

The right choice of optimization measures should always be based on the status quo of an existing IT environment. For this reason, every "air conditioning cosmetics" in the sense of Green IT should be preceded by a comprehensive analysis of the actual thermal conditions in the data center. For this purpose, an IT infrastructure , for example the air flows above and in the raised floor, cooling air losses, the efficiency of the cooling systems, the heat development on the racks, should be measured in detail in order to identify potential savings. On the basis of an evaluation of this data, a sensible catalog of measures should then be developed, which precisely quantifies the savings to be expected for each individual optimization step or when several thermal corrections are intertwined.

Various older servers have a power saving mode in the BIOS with which approx. 30% energy can be saved in the data center area.

In order to make energy consumption and the associated operating costs visible, a new list for supercomputers was created in addition to the TOP500 ( Green500 ). The Green500 compares the performance (in FLOPS) per performance (in watt) of the supercomputers instead of the pure performance.

Communication network

The traffic volume in the ICT networks is currently increasing by 50% to 100% per year. This growth will continue for the next 10 years. This is associated with an increase in energy consumption of approx. 16% to 20% per year. It is estimated that ICT devices and facilities are currently responsible for 2% of global CO 2 emissions. Other estimates come to the conclusion that this figure is closer to 3%.

The strong increase in mobile communications applications is a major contributor to the annual increase in traffic volume of 50% to 100% in the ICT networks. On the one hand, this has to do with the extensive expansion of mobile radio networks and the development of new services with higher data rates and improved quality of service, as well as the development of completely new fields of application. Developing economies in particular rely on mobile radio technology because of the mostly non-existent fixed network infrastructure, the low investment costs and the rapid network expansion.

With regard to the actual network technology, in connection with energy efficiency, one must particularly consider effects that arise from the expansion of broadband systems . The following situation arises in Germany:

  • The copper access technology with its widely branched network up to each customer dominates the growth in energy demand. For example, a comprehensive installation of VDSL in Germany with today's technology would generate a power requirement of 450 MW.
  • A requirement of 520 MW for the year 2010 is forecast for the entire broadband mobile network including end devices. The major part is caused by the cellular base stations. The associated transport networks contribute an estimated 25% to the energy demand. Despite their high number, the energy consumption of the mobile end devices is practically negligible compared to other components.
  • Increasing energy demand arises from company networks, i. H. due to the increasing bandwidth requirements of the local area networks (LAN) and the operation of high-speed LANs. Initial estimates predict a demand of over 150 MW for such networks in 2010.
  • At present, around 50% of private broadband connections are operated with a wireless LAN router (WLAN), which means that today an energy requirement of around 100 MW is generated.
  • The share of wide area technology (backbone router and WDM technology) in the total energy requirement of network technology is below 15%, but due to the high level of integration of the systems, considerable problems arise due to high energy densities, which can ultimately only be managed by complex air conditioning technology (which in turn also requires a lot of energy) become.

Office applications

The 26.5 million workstation computers in Germany consumed around 3.9 terawatt hours of electricity in 2010. A further 9.3 terawatt hours were generated during the manufacture of these devices. In this area of ​​application, further efficiency gains can arise through suitable developments. In addition to the direct optimization of hardware components in terms of power and material consumption, new technologies can also enable other IT applications. With desktop virtualization , resource-intensive desktop PCs can be replaced by simpler thin clients . The inadequate computing power of the thin clients is compensated centrally by a data center. This is also referred to as Thin Client & Server Based Computing (TC & SBC) . Such data centers can "produce" the resulting power depending on the load and thus save energy compared to desktop PCs, because these can react relatively poorly to idle times. Ideally, the user will not notice this change. The physical provision of computing power can in principle take place worldwide ( cloud computing ). In addition, TC & SBC can extend the service life of the end devices. In the “classic” solution, laptops or desktop PCs are often sorted out due to insufficient computing power, not due to material fatigue or damage. By relocating computing power to a data center, thin clients stay on the cutting edge of technology for longer and thus have the potential to reduce the consumption of resources in IT production.

Other applications include the use of video conferences instead of business trips and IT control, air conditioning or lighting of office buildings.

Operating systems

The operating system manufacturer Microsoft was criticized for the fact that the Windows operating system does not have the appropriate mechanisms to use energy efficiently. Due to the operating system's high market share, this could have a major impact on energy usage worldwide. According to Microsoft, this has changed since Windows Vista, but this is controversial. The problem is largely due to the fact that Windows up to the Vista version did not support central administration of the energy management by the system administrator. It is due to this fact that many companies do not optimize their energy use on individual computers.

With the introduction of Windows Vista this deficiency was partially remedied by the introduction of a central energy management. The new energy management is criticized because of its inflexibility. The main point of criticism is the inability to dynamically adapt the energy management to current needs. Accordingly, there are some software products on the market that fill this gap.

application development

The architecture of software applications has a significant impact on power consumption. Browser-based applications (web applications, rich internet applications ) in particular differ drastically depending on the architecture used. GWT World estimates that servers can serve up to 50 times more clients if modern Ajax architectures are used instead of classic web architectures. Modern Ajax architectures allow energy-saving but less powerful clients to be used without the user having to wait any longer.

Areas of application in private use

Logo of the " blue angel " certificate

In 2007, private households in Germany were responsible for around 60 percent of ICT electricity consumption, a total of 33 TWh. 11.2 TWh of this is accounted for by computers themselves (including peripherals). Televisions have the largest share with 15.8 TWh.

Consumers can not only save costs and energy in the short term through their shopping behavior, but also favor the further development of even more efficient devices. The everyday use of these devices is also in need of improvement. A lot of energy is still wasted unnecessarily, since devices are not switched off overnight, on weekends or on vacation, but left on standby . During the period of use, the standby function ensures that the energy requirement is automatically reduced when the device - e.g. B. a printer, copier or fax machine - does not receive an order and therefore "puts itself into a deep sleep". However, a not inconsiderable amount of energy can still be saved if the device is completely disconnected from the electricity as soon as it is no longer needed all the time. An example is a printer that consumes 20 watts in operation (i.e. when printing) and 6 watts in standby mode (i.e. when it is waiting for data to be printed). Even in energy-saving mode, 4 watts are still used.

See also: energy saving

For private users, over a quarter (28%) of the total annual electricity consumption of IT is generated by stand-by mode, a total of 9.5 TWh, here too televisions have the largest share with 3.7 TWh.

Other areas of application

  • Traffic management : traffic processes are improved, traffic jams and pollutant emissions are reduced. Areas with particularly heavy traffic can be blocked or restricted to traffic. In addition, the city can by a better traffic control system to public transport make attractive for citizens.
  • IT systems for the management of power plants with different energy generation plants (several lignite power plants , decentralized energy generation plants ): The power plants work more efficiently and conserve resources.
  • Smart metering using intelligent electricity meters that automatically measure and bill electricity costs. On a display, the customer can see at any time how much electricity he is currently using and where and how much it is costing him. This transparency can help to use energy more sparingly.

Refurbished IT

This is IT (mostly computers, notebooks and servers) that z. B. come from terminated leasing contracts. These are generally overhauled, cleaned, checked and finally sold again as used devices by the manufacturer or by a dealer. Since these are usually business devices, they can be used for a long time without problems due to the high-quality built-in parts. Refurbishing is therefore an environmentally friendly method of reusing existing devices in order to save resources.

Weaknesses of the approach

  • Greenwashing The term can be used by interested companies for their marketing strategies as they like, because although several protected trademarks have been defined, testable criteria for the “green” properties of products are not defined. Users of the concept therefore run the risk of promoting the private marketing strategies of the brand owners unchecked.
  • Rebound effects The use of economical computers and servers can mean that the devices are used longer per day or that more devices are purchased and used. These effects can destroy any attempts to save money and occur within companies / private households, as well as on a national and global level. For example, in the case of proof of work methods of computer science, rebound effectscan arise. With a lower energy requirement and thus lower operating costs, difficult tasks can be proven more cost-effectively. The difficulty of a proof of work and the computing power required for it can then be increased so that the function of an appropriate proof of performance is retained. In the crypto currency Bitcoin, this happensabout every two weeks and leads to increasing energy consumption.
  • Miscellaneous Any IT, unless used for entertainment purposes, is “green” per se. For example, online banking eliminates trips to the bank, e-mails save letters, electronic bookkeeping saves a lot of paper and many other savings effects. The problem with this, however, are various rebound effects (e.g. easier mailing of advertising)

Films dealing with the environmental impact of ICT

  • Another Promise (Korea, 2014)
  • The Empire of Shame (Korea, 2014)
  • Who pays the price? (Short film, China, 2014)
  • Blood in the Mobile (Denmark, 2010)
  • Behind the Screen (Austria, 2011)
  • Story of Electronics (short film, USA, 2010)
  • Welcome to Sodom (2018)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Green IT - Why Green IT? , BMWI / BITKOM
  2. ↑ Green IT - Where does Green IT work? BMWI / BITKOM
  3. ^ Report and overview on the use of renewable energy within the framework of the Click Clean Initiative Greenpeace, Click Clean
  4. ↑ https://www.nager-it.de/informationen/aktuelles
  5. ↑ Study ( Memento from May 22, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) Borderstep Institute
  6. ↑ Guide - How do I measure the PUE correctly? ( Memento of January 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.8MB) BITKOM
  7. ↑ Presentation on the GreenIT Initiative in Japan (PDF; 2.2 MB) 2008
  8. ↑ Technical article on Gartner Best Practices for Cooling Optimization
  9. ↑ TheGreen500 - About , Prometeus GmbH / TOP500
  10. ↑ Roadmap "Resource-Efficient Workplace Solutions 2020" - Development of a Lead Market for Green Office Computing . ( Memento from February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 950 kB). BITKOM, p. 8.
  11. ↑ Roadmap "Resource-Efficient Workplace Solutions 2020" - Development of a Lead Market for Green Office Computing . ( Memento from February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 950 kB). BITKOM, p. 8f.
  12. ↑ Umweltbundesamt (Ed.), Green IT: Future Challenges and Opportunities - Background Paper for the BMU / UBA / BITKOM Annual Conference 2009 (2009), p. 14.
  13. ↑ How Windows XP Wasted $ 25 Billion of Energy . November 21, 2006. Retrieved November 21, 2005.
  14. ↑ Power Management In Windows Vista . Retrieved January 1, 2011.
  15. ↑ Fraunhofer study to estimate the energy demand of the further development in the information society ( Memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.98 MB) 2009, p. 68.
  16. ↑ a b Fraunhofer study to estimate the energy demand of the further development in the information society ( Memento of February 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.98 MB) 2009, p. 91.
  17. ↑ Printer / copier / scanner DCP-135C ( Memento from September 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) - See section General → Power consumption
  18. ↑ Why bitcoin uses so much energy The Economist
  19. ↑ http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_entertainment/624867.html
  20. ↑ Facebook page for the film Who Pays the Price? - The Human Cost ( Memento from May 28, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )
  21. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-kJ5Podjw&feature=kp
  22. ↑ http://www.behindthescreen.at/
  23. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW_7i6T_H78
  24. ↑ http://www.welcome-to-sodom.de/