Role of IT in Reducing Carbon Emissions

Source:http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Data_centers_How_to_cut_carbon_emissions_and_costs_2255

Greenhouse gas emission can be attributed to emissions related to ICT - s/w laptops, PC's, data centers, networking, telecommunications & mobile phones. (ICT is overtaking aviation in terms of impact on environment.)

There are 2 sources of contribution to environmental impact:
1. Embedded s/w - energy & material used for production, transport & disposal of ICT
2. Energy used during the life-time of the ICT components - device & s/w

Examples -
1. PC's the major part of emission is in production as the PC's are idle during most of their lifetime.
2. For data centers, emissions is more a part of their working lifetime and less as compared to its manufacturing.

Geographically the growth in emissions from ICT is happening in emerging economies, India, China. Application wise, data centres will be growing the fastest followed by growth in workplaces as more and more of knowledge workers come into the workforce across the globe.

Within ICT the greatest opportunity to reduce emissions are:
1. Making ICT greener - i.e., making hardware more efficient, making larger more efficient data centres. Management initiatives - Productising infrastructure, virtualizing technology, industrializing the production of ICT.

2. Using ICT to make business processes more efficient, example - in energy production and energy distribution managing data better, having sensors to create relevant data and smart grids to ustilize the algorithmised data for efficient operations.The manner in which ICT can improve manufacturing or reduce energy usage is for example:

• In automotive production just knowing the carbon footprint across (global) supply chain.
• In private homes, making homes smarter to reduce carbon footprint of the private household.
• Optimizing of logistics & transportation to avoid congestion and waste of fuel, by looking at efficent less obstructed ways.

Net cost to companies for optimizing their energy usage and optimizing their processes using information technology (ICT) - The business process optimization case is more positive in terms of abatement as it looks at effcient usage of resources, better data capture and processes makes processes more efficient directly impacting organisations costs.

Provider and user end of technology receive these messages differently. The users (Banks, transportation, IT, aluminum production co's) are more open and excited to use ICT as a means of creating internal efficiencies as well as reducing carbon footprint while the providers (hardware and software providers) are more apprehensive / sceptical.

Dematerializing certain business processes (such as telecommuting, using more video-conferences) has limited impact, changing processes that can enable reduction on travel and other means, ICT would have major impact on the abatement potential.