Green Technology Forum

Innovators in the green information-technology movement reap good publicity from their ever-higher standards of energy efficiency. The real goody two-shoes, however, inflict those standards on their competitors.

Sun Microsystems has taken the second approach. At the annual meeting of the Carbon Disclosure Project–a non-profit investor organization devoted to greater transparency in greenhouse gas emission statistics–Sun released a set of open-source software tools that companies can use to track carbon emissions. The software will be hosted at OpenEco.org, a sort of social-networking site for businesses designed to foster communication about measuring and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Our goal is to lower the barriers for companies to measure and report their environmental footprint,” says Sun’s vice president of eco-responsibility, Dave Douglas. “For a company like Sun, figuring out how much energy you’re burning is pretty complex. So we’re trying to use open-source software development ideas to take the tools we’ve developed internally and make them publicly available.”

The Carbon Disclosure Project, a consortium of 315 investment groups with a gargantuan $41 trillion in assets, has worked since 2000 to encourage companies to share their environmental statistics and develop universal standards of environmental accounting. At this year’s annual meeting, former President Bill Clinton emphasized the power of transparency and data collection in mobilizing the fight against climate change.

“I think the evidence of this decade is clear, that if we organize properly, addressing the problem of climate change will provide the biggest economic boom since we mobilized for World War II,” Clinton said. “The problem is I can’t prove it, except with a couple of examples. We don’t have the systems in place to know what the problem is, to know what the progress is, and to maximize the likelihood of the best outcome. That’s why the Carbon Disclosure Project is so important.”

Accounting for energy use isn’t easy. Just determining the carbon emissions per watt of electricity used in each of the company’s various zip codes is a daunting task, says Sun’s Douglas. Sun’s offices in Colorado, for instance, use power generated entirely by coal. But the company’s California offices use power from wind and nuclear power sources as well–and consequently get the same amount of energy for a third of the carbon emissions.

According its own tally, Sun has plenty to be proud of. Douglas says the company has cut its energy output by 20% in the last five years. Sun’s transparency project also draws attention to the company’s hyper-efficient server technology. In a test case last June, Sun reduced the energy used by one its data centers by 93% by switching out older models for its new Niagara servers.

source: Forbes.com

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 5:41 am and is filed under Energy, Environment, Ethics, News, Regulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.