Towards Low Carbon ICT conference

The Low Carbon ICT conference, held in Oxford University, and organised by Howard Noble and his team, was most interesting. Details are at:-
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/lowcarbonict/conferences/conf-1.htm.

There were presentations on:-

• Low carbon ICT in context of Oxford University
• Low carbon approach in large hospital using virtualised servers
• A wonderful overview of reducing carbon in data centres
• Greening the full lifecycle (from manufacture through to recycling)
• Facebook meets green business
• Green technologies in the pipeline

I was very taken by the talk which addressed the power loss chain as applied to data centres. Liam Newcombe, of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, is acknowledged and thanked for the following slide:-


Just 0.5% of the energy of the fossil fuel is actually used to deliver power for computing.

When Liam's slides become available on the above web address, take a look and send your comments.

There is considerable scope for increasing the percentage if useful power used.

The Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/home) is a very interesting site. "The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems."

The conference agreed that the low carbon ICT area is going to grow and grow in importance.