Greening Government ICT

Yesterday's Guardian newspaper talked (Whitehall to become carbon neutral with aid of smart PCs) about UK government plans to make all of its computers carbon neutral by 2012, presaging a speech by Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson (see also Cabinet Office news release).

He was set to announce 18 measures to change the habits of Whitehall civil servants, hoping that by 2020 government technology will be carbon neutral throughout its lifetime, including manufacture and disposal. The government is the largest buyer of information and communications technology in the UK and its IT equipment is responsible for up to a fifth of the government's carbon emissions - 460,000 tonnes a year.

Turning off every desktop PC in central government for the 16 hours that fall outside the standard working day could save up to 117,500 tonnes of CO2 per year, a Cabinet Office briefing document says. Measures include:

• A centralised system to switch off computers detected as inactive
• removal of active screensavers
• civil servants will be urged to ensure re-use of PCs which are discarded but are still serviceable
• an audit of data centres and server use to make sure they are running at maximum efficiency

Greening Government ICT

The full list of measures is contained in Appendix B of a newly published 28-page report Greening Government ICT (PDF here) - a report packed with useful nuggets of information about the impact of ICT. For example, in the report's foreword, Mr Watson says: "By turning off just one computer overnight we can save 235kg of CO2 in a year. ... turning off every one of Whitehall’s 500,000 computers at night would have the same effect as taking 40,000 cars off the road."

"The Carbon Trust estimates that it [office equipment] consumes 15% of the total electricity used in offices, expected to rise to 30% by 2020, with around two-thirds of the energy consumed by office equipment being attributed to computers."

Of course, these figures don't just apply to central government. They apply to many smaller local government bodies and to thousands and thousands of private sector organisations too. If you do the arithmetic, an organisation turning off 500 computers at night would have the same effect as taking 40 cars off the road. The measures, therefore, could equally be applied across great swathes of UK government and commerce.

The full list is as follows:

1. Remove active screensavers
2. Switch monitors to standby after 5 minutes of inactivity (no active screensaver)
3. Shut down PCs after office hours
4. Enable active power management on desktops (standby / hibernate after a defined period of inactivity)
5. Ensure re-use of equipment that is no longer required but is still serviceable. If re-use is not possible recycle or ensure green disposal.
6. Specify low-power consumption CPUs and high-efficiency Power Supply Units (80% conversion or better)
7. Apply Thin Client technology (the report explains: "A Thin client is less complex than a PC and contains fewer components, increasing its life over that of a normal PC and reducing maintenance and support costs and thus energy consumption. However additional energy is required to support the greater bandwidth necessary for connection to its server as well as to run the server and its supporting air-conditioning equipment.")
8. Apply timer switches to non-networked technology and printers
9. Set default green printing including duplex and grey scale
10. Optimise power-saving sleep mode on printers
11. Printer consolidation
12. Device consolidation (one recommendation: "Move from using PC to laptop or Thin Client and remote access services on a home or other non-work device connected to the internet to access email.")
13. Server Optimisation
14. Reduce cooling in the data centre to appropriate levels and increase the ambient room temperature
15. Identify servers and data disks in the data centre that are running but not providing any services and decommission
16. Specify low-power consumption, low voltage servers high-efficiency Power Supply Units (80% conversion or better)
17. Ensure re-use of equipment that is no longer required but is still serviceable
18. Data centre audit

No SaaS... yet

Sadly, from our perspective, there is no mention of the potential for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), though the positive mentions of Thin Client technology (expanded above) show that Whitehall at least recognises the value of hosting data remotely, and, encouragingly (on p.13), the report says UK Government will "work with departments and industry to research and identify more radical proposals to go beyond the easy changes, including the development of longer term low carbon solutions e.g. servers, data centres, more efficient hardware and software ...." Maybe SaaS is on the government's radar?

In addition to the low carbon objectives, SaaS can also offer UK Government other benefits, not least enhanced security. Over the past few months, the UK press has gloated at a succession of security breaches, many arising because individuals had downloaded confidential data to CDs or laptops. Managing key data in a secure data centre and enabling authorised staff to access this remotely via a standard browser from any government PC or laptop would quickly reduce the need to carry large amounts of data around.

Update (23 July 2008): On 'thin client' technology, a Finance|Tech news article says: "remember: a thin client uses 15 watts of electricity instead of 150 for a workstation".

Another article, How Green is your BI? (BI = business intelligence) usefully suggests:

"It is better to design reports keeping the exact user in mind. ... This also includes promoting report designs that are more mobile phone compatible (to reduce dependence on the company’s IT infrastructure and reducing the pressure on the service level agreements [SLAs] for maintaining the IT infrastructure). Some of these formats could be key performance indicators (KPIs), alerts indicating a specific event or decision, instead of sending a full-fledged report to users’ workstations. "