Wasteful IT industry must clean up its act

Too much energy is being squandered and a blind eye has been turned for too long on the use of rare metals from questionable sources. Reform will not come cheap.

The US is showing concern that manufacturers of devices such as smartphones are increasingly reliant on rare metals often sourced from mines with deplorable working conditions, such as the ones in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Tom Stoddart / Getty ImagesShow less

The global IT industry has been identified as an ecological villain and a major polluter, in contrast to its traditional image of being a "clean" industry.

According to industry estimates, IT data centres, with their vast computer banks, worldwide use about 30 billion watts of electricity, equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. However, research carried out by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company shows that, on average, they use only 6 to 12 per cent of the energy powering their computers to perform computations.

The rest is essentially used to keep the computers idling and ready in case of a crash. It has been estimated that a single IT industry data centre can consume as much power as a medium-sized town in the United States.

The legislature in countries such as the US is also showing concern that manufacturers of devices such as smartphones are increasingly reliant on rare metals too often sourced from mines with deplorable working conditions.

Warren Wilson, a lead analyst for the international research company Ovum, says it is "no secret" in the industry that much energy is wasted. "There is a close correlation between energy consumed and carbon emitted."

But so great is the power consumption of IT service providers as they move increasingly to remote hosted IT services, known as cloud computing, that they are now starting to invest in new ways of reducing the power consumption of their vast data banks.

"One of the biggest initiatives in the technology industry is the effort to get energy usage down. Not so much to be green or to avoid regulation, but because it is limiting adoption and sales," says Rob Enderle, the principal analyst at Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.

Hewlett-Packard "has gone so far as to develop a massive alternative energy programme looking at unusual generation like harnessing methane gas from dairies, for instance". Google is investing "massively" in solar and wind power, he adds.

But many of the data centres gobbling up energy are run by private companies in other sectors outside Silicon Valley that have little incentive to change their ways.

Mr Wilson believes that one solution is for data centres to be located in temperate climates in buildings designed to be cooled naturally by simply opening the windows.

But many organisations with their computer servers located in the heart of existing sealed building have shown themselves unwilling to shoulder the expense of relocating them into more ecologically sound facilities. However, some sectors may yet be forced to reassess their IT energy expenditure.

"The financial services sector, for example, has become increasingly IT-dependent to an extent where its energy bills are great enough to be significant," says Mr Wilson.

But he adds that most companies are more concerned about the sums they are spending on energy consumption and that most consumers do not give a first or second thought to the levels of power consumption needed to power the online services provided by companies such as Google and Facebook.

As most governments are driven by the political concerns of their citizens, some regulators are proving to be slow in following the example of European countries in trying to restrict the carbon emissions of data centres.

Consumers are also generally ignorant of the cost in human suffering of sourcing some of the rare metals, now universally used in products such as smartphones, says Mr Wilson.

"Most people are entirely unaware that their devices contain metals of questionable origin. Only a few places in the world have these metals in sufficient quantities to make them worth mining."

Tungsten, for example, is what is know as a "conflict" metal that is widely used in mobile phones. It is the best material for the small hammer that enables mobile phones to vibrate. Congo is rich in tungsten. According to the research firm NPD, smartphone shipments will reach 1 billion units worldwide by 2016.

But American legislators are finally waking up to the matter of questionable sourcing and laws have been drafted to make it obligatory for companies buying materials from countries suspected to be culprits to make disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The IT industry is also developing ways of reducing energy consumption using technologies such as "virtualisation", which enables a single computer server to securely host the data of more than one organisation, says Mr Wilson.

However, developing and adopting new energy-saving technologies and complying with western legislation may prove to be too expensive and onerous for many companies.

"As with most things there are clearly two ways of dealing with the problem: develop unique technologies that are far more efficient and that generate power more safely and efficiently, or ship the problem overseas where resources are cheaper and there is far less regulation," says Mr Enderle.

"Unfortunately the US government has a tradition of focusing companies on the latter path."