When it comes to wasting energy, some of the worst culprits are where you’re sitting right now — residential and office buildings. By some estimates, the carbon emissions of the buildings where we live and work are higher than those of all vehicles combined. Then there’s the issue of those separate but necessary buildings, data centers — we have an endless stream of information being generated, and storing it is sucking up enormous amounts of power, water, and other resources.

A major effort has been underway to make all of the above more efficient, and companies are using ever-newer technology to edge closer to that elusive “carbon neutral” badge. And nowhere is the good fight being fought more enthusiastically (and visibly) than at the largest computer company in the world. IBM has long been one of the leaders in large-scale environmental initiatives, and their efforts have shown considerable results. Richard Lechner, Big Blue’s Vice President of Energy and Environment, kindly agreed to speak with us about how the company is working to make both its customers and itself radically more efficient and, ultimately, sustainable.

Infrastructurist: What is your department’s M.O. for achieving energy efficiency and sustainability?

Rich Lechner: We divide our work into three categories. The first is green infrastructure, which covers data centers and IT, virtual consolidation, and designing data centers, servers and storage to make them more energy efficient. We also focus within the IT space on attacking the demand side of the equation –- addressing the fact that, for many of our clients, their data is doubling every 9 to 18 months and their acute capacity is doubling every 18 to 36 months. So no matter how efficient you make the IT technology, it’s not sustainable.

So we turn to more efficient compression algorithms and data elimination systems –- designing applications to be less resource consumptive, creating services-oriented architecture, and allowing applications to run in highly efficient virtualized environments.

Of course, infrastructure is more than just IT – we also work on efficiency solutions for buildings and transportation systems, like monitoring vehicle fleets for tire pressure for optimal fuel efficiency.
It’s really about applying the digital infrastructure over the physical infrastructure, and figuring out the broadest possible way to make that infrastructure more efficient from a carbon and energy and water perspective.

The second portion of the portfolio is what we call “Sustainable Operations”: How can we help clients optimize all other aspects of their operations for energy efficiency and waste. For example, we’d look at a company’s supply chain and distribution network to consolidate their distribution centers and reduce their physical footprint, or change the routing of their delivery vehicles to create shorter trips, and thus fewer emissions.[SButtonZ button="digg"]

We also look at products themselves – how to use less raw materials in their production, how to design products for recycle-ability, then there’s reducing waste and weight of the packaging. Then comes work force management (which we’ve done quite a bit at IBM itself) – we suggest things like enabling mobile working and telecommuting, reducing paper consumption, making it less necessary for employees to attend a meeting via car or plane.

Finally, we look beyond individual companies to the broader systems that we all participate in – solutions like Smart Grid, our system of 50 smart grids around the world, or intelligent transportation systems we’re heading up in places like Stockholm or London or Singapore. We develop everything from road charging systems to predictive analysis, to figure out things like where traffic congestion will occur up to an hour in advance, and provide pricing signals to encourage drivers to go a different route. Also water infrastructure and natural resource management. Managing manufacturing operations to minimize water use can result in a huge boost in water efficiency.

I: What about newer technologies like nanotech? How are those being applied?

RL: We’re doing quite a bit with nanotech applied to advanced membranes for better water desalination and chemical removal. We also have work going on in the area of lithium air batteries. And just a week ago we announced some work with Stanford University on recyclable plastic and organic processes for breaking polymers down into monomers to get to reusable plastic. We have the largest math department outside of academia , which is important because whether you’re talking about green buildings or more efficient servers, the common thread throughout is business analytics and optimization – taking tons of data and analyzing it in real time to optimize processes and systems for carbon, energy, and water.

I: What are your priorities? What are the absolute most important goals that must be achieved in the energy sector in the next decade?

RL: The number one goal is to have our clients (and ourselves) optimize for energy – eliminating energy and water waste will help reduce their cost structure, overcome significant operational barriers and reduce gas emissions. Many of our clients today, whether manufacturers or data centers, are running into operational limits in terms of access to energy and water. In many parts of the world today, you can’t build a new data center because there’s not enough power on the grid to support it. By addressing energy efficiency – and thermal efficiency — up front, we help them overcome short-term operational limits while at the same time delivering significant cost reduction.

As far as internal goals, from 1990 to 2007 we reduced our global CO2 emissions by 45%. Our goal is to reduce that a further 12% by 2012 – and we’re on track to do so.

IBM is the largest commercial data center in the world. We consume about 5 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year. Our objective since 2007 has been to double the storage capacity of our data centers for our own operations and for our clients, without increasing our emissions, by the end of 2010. We’re on track for that goal as well.

Then there’s recycling. IBM is the largest recycler of IT equipment in the world –- we do about 40,000 units a week. We do track this – last year for every 2 metric tons of IT equipment we made and sold into the marketplace, we recycled 1 ton, of which less than 1% ended up in a landfill –- so a 2-to-1 ration in terms of what we manufacture and ship and what we recycle.

I: It’s clear that data center design and building both need to change. How can we redesign? What needs to be done specifically?

RL: There are a couple key points we promote. The first is to design and build data centers to leverage the environment around them. You hear a lot about free air cooling – we recently built a data center in Boulder that has a highly efficient cooling system that takes advantage of the ambient temperature in Colorado and brings in that cool air without having to run air conditioning. We also take the waste heat from that center to heat the office space on the property.

The second point is to use a modular approach to every data center we design. These data centers have an average 20- to 25-year life span. Traditionally, you build the data center with all the AC and cooling capacity to support the end state of the center, even though initially it’s only partially populated with IT equipment. With a modular approach, you add the power as you add the equipment itself. So you’re adding capacity as needed. By doing that, customers are finding you can significantly defer the upfront capital and operating expense, sometimes up to 40% for capital expenses and 50% for total operating expenses.

I: Are we (the media, the government) not focusing enough attention on data centers as big-time energy wasters?

RL: If you’d asked that question 3 years ago I would have said yes. Today data centers are getting a lot more attention. Can more be done? Yes . The good news is that there are now over 800 incentive programs offered by regulatory bodies or utility companies to incentivize energy efficiency in data centers. The bad news is that it’s such a broad mix of incentives that many companies aren’t aware that they exist, or of how to use them.

Specifically, the incentives range from federal tax rebates to lower utility rates offered by a utility company to incentives for subsidizing upfront capital expenses. So if you deploy a virtualization project or do an energy audit, many state agencies might offer you cost-reduction incentives. Utility companies will reduce their rates for a highly energy efficient data center, for a period of time – it varies widely by state. What we found recently for a customer building a new data center in Illinois was that the total incentives they could apply for would pay for 28% of all the project costs. Some would even be paid up front. And that doesn’t even touch the question of how much the customer will save in reduced energy costs, operating costs etc. These added government incentives are a layer of value that many people aren’t even aware of.

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Tags: Efficiency, environment