Computers – This is, as you might suspect, an area where lots of energy gets consumed. According to Emerson, at their “Energy Logic” webpage: “Data centers in the United States alone soaked up about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or $4.5 billion worth of electricity in 2006. If current energy usage trends continue, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts U.S. data centers will use more than 100 billion kWh by 2011, representing $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs and 2.5 percent of the nation’s total electricity.” It’s clearly in the best interests of industry to get these numbers down.
I used to live across the street from a million-square-foot “telco hotel” that Cisco routers and other high-energy equipment packed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Think that stuff doesn’t generate heat? They had AC going all the time in all weather. Lot’s of noise as a result, which was our community’s main concern. In any event, to get the energy consumption down, one thing you want to do is cut down on the heat, and thus the need for the AC. That’s one of Emerson’s strategies. For more from them, see this information.
Green IT is a big, critically important and rapidly growing field. Nobody covers it better than GreenerComputing, part of the complex of “GreenBiz.” (I referenced one of the sister sites, “Greener Building News” and its editor, Rob Watson, at this post recently.) There’s a huge quantum of useful and well-crafted information at GreenerComputing.
The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is an initiative embraced by industry and supported by such environmental pioneers as NRDC and WWF. Its members include Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft and a very good number of other big and medium-sized IT players.
Concrete – Here’s an area of the “old economy” that is still very much with us and essential to growth and economic well-being throughout the world. However, there’s a real GHG burden: making Portland cement is responsible for about five percent of carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources. Concrete Is Remixed With Environment in Mind from the “NY Times” highlights some breakthroughs in this essential industry, including sequestering carbon by bubbling carbon dioxide through wet cement.
The article also notes an exciting possibility that I talked about in Desalination and Energy, Plus A Concrete Idea for Carbon Sequestration from last summer, namely using seawater in an industrial process that takes waste heat and carbon dioxide from power plants to make cement. Calera says it can take more than 90% of the carbon dioxide from power plant emissions to, for all intents and purposes, sequester it in concrete. Sweet.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has a robust Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI). See this recent report, Climate Actions, from the CSI for a look at the various fronts on which progress is being made to reduce GHG. For more on the industry itself, see the Portland Cement Association’s website.
