Tech Declared Both Culprit, Savior in Climate Change

Tech Declared Both Culprit, Savior in Climate Change

The IT industry is both a big consumer of energy and a candidate to help reduce consumption, according to an executive panel.

Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
Sunday, October 14, 2007 07:00 AM PDT

Climate change is both a large-scale crisis and a huge opportunity, and IT has a role in both, industry executives said at a panel discussion last week.

In hopes of fending off environmental disaster from rising temperatures and ocean levels, technologists need to come up with more efficient technologies and renewable energy sources, panelists said at the annual TechNet Innovation Summit at UC Berkeley. Innovation in this area is "the biggest economic opportunity in our lifetime," said John Doerr, a longtime venture capitalist and a partner in the Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The benefits have already started flowing to Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Jonathan Schwartz, the company's president and CEO. Sun bet five years ago that power would become the dominant issue in the server business, and its first system that was slower but designed for power efficiency shipped about 18 months ago, he said. Those types of servers have become a billion-dollar business, the fastest-growing at Sun, Schwartz said.

He called on the IT industry to adopt a standard, like the Energy Star label for household appliances, to show the efficiency of hardware. "Just forcing everybody to become more transparent will drive a lot of change," he said. The industry will play a critical role because of the power consumption it creates, according to Schwartz. Between 3 percent and 4 percent of all electricity consumed worldwide goes to running data centers, he said, and that is likely to grow as emerging nations such as China and India become more connected with the Internet and the rest of the world.

...