Although IT didn't feature prominently at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last month, a new initiative called GreenTouch might lead to significant ICT contributions to a greener world.
Announced about two weeks ago, this new global consortium is led by Bell Labs, the R&D division of French-US telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, And it is drawing political support from countries as diverse as UK, US, and France to Portugal, South Korea and even a little from India. Its objective is rather ambitiousto say the least -- to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today.
In other words what GreenTouch says is that, in five years, with the same amount of power that it uses in a single day, it is possible to run the communications networks of the world, including the Internet, for three years. This is equivalent to a saving of 7.8 giga tons of CO2, or 15% of the total world emissions predicted by 2020.
Indeed, considering that the ICT industry today is responsible for a relatively small portion of global greenhouse gas emissions - about 2 to 2.5 % according to the International Telecommunications Union, that it can save so much of carbon dioxide is almost unbelievable.
Moreover, communication network's like fixed-line telecommunications, mobile telecommunications and LAN and office telecommunications, share in that is even lower accounting for a mere 31%.
But hold on; in the next decade, with another billion particularly from the developing countries using the communications networks to upload and share video, images and information through an additional estimated 15 billion new devices, ICT's contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is projected to nearly double - to about 4% - by 2020.
This naturally then means that the world is heading for anexponential growth in ICT energy consumption "which we, as an industry, have to jointly address." says Gee Rittenhouse, vice president of research at Bell Labs and GreenTouch head.
Achieving the kind of reduction that GreenTouch wants to achieve though will not be easy since there is still no solution available now to reduce the energy consumption.
"Today's networks are designed for optimal capacity, not efficient energy use," says Dan Kilper, the New Jersey-based member of the technical staff of Bell labs. Moreover the technologies used over the networks is so diverse that whatever efforts that are currently pursued to achieve energy efficiency can produce only incremental results, say the GreenTouch experts.
Yet the consortium is confident that the 1000-fold improvement in energy efficiency of the Internet and communications networks could be achieved.
"What is needed is a major breakthrough; a total rethinking of the way telecom networks are designed in terms of low energy processing," says Kilper.
The initiative, he says, aims to come out with innovations that could revolutionize the architecture, as well including a complete reworking of protocols. And that means "a lot of new things are going to come out of re-engineered networks."
Which, say experts, poses a big challenge for CIOs as well.
The CIO's biggest challenge, GreenTouch spokespeople point out, would not only be to balance future networks for both optimal capacity and energy efficiency.
The responsibilities of future CIOs would also expand beyond the information system of the organization to include even some of the responsibilities of say the marketing and human resource departments for making the best use of IT, says a human resource expert Vanessa Robinson.
Meanwhile, the first meeting of the consortium will take place in a few weeks from now --in February -- when it will adopt its first goal to deliver, within five years, a reference architecture, specifications, technology development road map and demonstrations of key components needed to realize a fundamental re-design of networks (including the introduction of entirely new technologies) that can reduce energy consumption both by individuals and in aggregate.
"This is an open initiative which means that anybody and everybody can participate in this effort," says Paul Ross, spokesperson, Alcatel Lucent. "We intend to define the challenge through a focused and collaborative cross-industry initiative."
