Using ICT for emissions reduction
June 21st 2009 The issue of green ICT (Information Communications Technology) has risen rapidly up both the government and business agendas over the last two years, evidenced by the number of high profile reports, studies and government initiatives on this topic. Some have focused on the growing footprint of ICT itself (i.e. the energy demand of things like computers, servers and infrastructure) which Gartner estimated at around 2% of global emissions. Others have explored ways in which the intelligent application of ICT can deliver emissions reductions across the wider economy says Emma Fryer, head of Climate Change Programmes, Intellect
Intellect produced its own report “High Tech: Low Carbon – the role of technology in tackling climate change” in February 2008. As a statement for the sector its objective was to cover both aspects of the debate – firstly to demonstrate how the sector is improving the efficiency of its own products and services,but more importantly to explore ways in which technology can help other sectors become more efficient, by enhancing existing processes, by enabling new ways of working and by transforming behaviour.
This split reflects the first of two interesting paradoxes presented by ICT. Almost all ICT solutions consume energy to function, and we have to do all we can to minimise that energy requirement. And we are making pretty good progress. For instance, microprocessors (better known as chips) have become a million times more efficient in the last 30 years – so Moore’s law works for efficiency as well as size. Secondly, mobile phones have also become about 100 times more efficient in the last 15 years- which of course means that a modern phone needs about 1/100th of the energy needed by one in, say 1994. And these examples are not untypical.
So some good progress is being made on tackling our 2%,but ICT actually has a more important role in helping to address the other 98% of emissions across the rest of the economy, particularly in high impact areas such as energy generation, transport and buildings. ICT helps other sectors to work more efficiently – for instance, logistics software optimises fleet movements, electronic communications reduce paper use and minimise travel.
We have identified three classes of technology that can contribute to an overall reduction in energy demand: enhancing technologies let us do what we do already, only more efficiently, enabling technologies produce evolutionary change in everyday processes, transforming technologies let us do different things altogether. These are loose categories and there is some inevitable overlap.
Enhancing technologies make us more efficient while allowing us to continue doing the things we normally do. Enhancing technologies include monitoring and analytical tools which enable users to identify waste and save energy and money - for instance an energy management system across a single site saved Kodak millions of dollars in energy costs. Logistics systems optimise the supply chain and streamline fleet operations and intelligent transport systems improve vehicle efficiency.
Improving efficiency alone is not enough to decouple economic growth from energy use. Enabling technologies help here because they change the way we do things: they enable new processes, new ways of working. Enabling technologies include energy-related applications that facilitate renewable generation and a whole series of technologies based on virtualisation, including in-silico testing and modelling and paperless office technologies.
Transforming technologies change fundamental behaviour and lead to the creation of new industries. Transforming technologies do not just save energy,preserve resources and reduce waste, they change what we do, stimulate innovation and drive new business models. Broadband is a classic enabling technology because it has allowed the growth of dependent technologies like video conferencing. (Vodafone saved 5,520 tonnes of CO2 and made a dramatic dent in their travel costs in one year by implementing videoconferencing).
When we refer to new business models, we are already seeing new business relationships emerging. Partnership approaches are becoming more and more important which could have significant implications for the future. For instance, if suppliers of virtual conferencing (eg Cisco, HP or Microsoft) moved into partnerships with, say BAA, they could jointly provide a service to bring people together, whether virtually or physically. Airports could then provide a suite of teleconferencing facilities as well as travel facilities – they are well connected by public transport to large population centres.The virtual offerings could grow and over time, displace more and more physical travel.
Optimising efficiency across the whole economy actually involves expanding the implementation of ICT in order to drive larger efficiency gains. So an increase in the footprint of ICT may be inevitable, even welcomed, if- and only if - it delivers much larger emissions reductions elsewhere, and if the sector itself is minimising its own energy use.
One might say that it is rather convenient for the ICT sector to be promoting arguments that increase the use of its products and services, but in fact this view is confirmed by a number of independent external bodies A report from the WWF identifies ten uses of ICT that could together save at least a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. Analysts McKinsey estimate that 7.8 billion tonnes could be saved by the use of ICT in buildings, power, transport, manufacturing and teleworking, and GeSI, the Global eSustainability Initiative, estimate that the intelligent use of ICT could reduce overall emissions by 15%, dwarfing the 2% emissions directly attributable to ICT.
For instance the WWF explored scenarios for using ICT to improve efficiency. One very striking example was a local government study in Sunderland that evaluated different reduction scenarios that could result from the intelligent application of ICT. Their best case scenario involved an increase in emissions from ICT of over 4000%, which delivered a total CO2 reduction of around 30%. The results may seem hard to grasp until you realise that the ICT emissions were so small in proportion to the overall footprint that even a 4000% increase only took the total ICT associated emissions to 0.002% of that overall footprint. WWF go further by warning that a single-minded focus on absolute reduction targets of CO2 from ICT would not be strategic and could, moreover, be counterproductive.
So we should challenge the current perspective.A recent OECD study reveals that the vast majority of Green ICT initiatives are focused on the direct effects of ICT and only a tiny percentage on the enabling effects which we, and they, believe are much more important. It seems to us that 98% of the attention is focused on 2% of the problem and 2% of the attention is focused on 98% of the problem – or at least that the focus is disproportionate. We need to consider the big picture.
What we need – and do not yet have - is an economic model that provides a clear and consistent picture of the real gains and losses in overall emissions so that we do not concentrate on reducing the 2% at the expense of bigger savings elsewhere.
As mentioned above, there are two paradoxes associated with ICT and climate change – the first was the fact that ICT cannot operate without electricity yet has a staggering capacity to deliver emissions reductions across the wider economy. The second paradox is slightly more complex. While ICT provides efficiency solutions, it is, unfortunately, also capable of giving a new lease of life to inherently bad things. This is because investment in ICT can deliver efficiency improvements that can enable carbon-intensive industries and activities to remain competitive for longer – rather than sweeping them away and replacing them with completely new alternatives. It is therefore vital to use technology intelligently as an enabler of change – not to prolong existing and wasteful systems.
So where does that leave us? There is growing recognition that ICT is one of the key enablers to deliver efficiency gains across the wider economy and to underpin the transition to a genuinely low-carbon economy. But despite the steady strengthening of policy instruments designed to drive down emissions and encourage the growth of low carbon goods and services, the transition to a low carbon economy will not happen overnight. Pipeline technologies still need development before they can be implemented and it will be a long time before existing technologies such as low carbon vehicles will have replaced all the traditional stock in the transport system. So this is a two phase process – in the short to medium term we will rely on ICT to reduce emissions from traditional processes and provide virtualised substitutes for high impact activities. In the longer term ICT will underpin the alternative, lowcarbon technologies that will eventually take over.
1 “From Fossil to Future with Innovative ICT solutions: Increased CO2 Emissions from ICT are needed to save the climate”,WWF,March 2008
2 Developed by Best Foot Forward | 
