While on a plane to Reykjavik recently, I struck up conversation with the couple sitting next to me. Native Icelanders, they were on their way back from the UK after a holiday. We chatted about Iceland and our conversation drifted onto the subject of Iceland’s geography. At a latitude of 64 degrees north, Iceland, like the UK, should be colder than it is, but the gulf stream from the Caribbean keeps it habitable.

Bordering on the Arctic Circle, Iceland still has Glaciers. On the subject of these Glaciers and the weather in general, the couple, who had lived in Iceland for 50+ years, were quite clear about the subject of ‘climate change’. The glaciers were melting. They had lost 30% of their size in their life time.

Iceland’s main industry is fishing. But the fish were all moving north to the territorial waters around Greenland, threatening their main industry with collapse. The couple said it used to be a regular occurrence for schools to be closed in the winter, with roads impassable and snow tires used on cars. That hadn’t happened in 10 years they said.

It was sobering talking to people who had real first hand experience of our planet’s climate changing, rather than the ‘it’s happening somewhere else’ of news reports.

Each day does seem to bring some new stark report about the state of our planet, whether it be ice cores from Antarctica showing CO2 at it’s highest for 650,000 years, biodiversity plummeting across the globe, or species in the UK moving north en-masse.
Yesterday, a further 700 page report on the problem.

On the face of it, things seem bleak.

Companies have as much to do as individuals to prevent massive changing climate shifts from occurring. In IT terms, the push towards changing habits has come about due to the massive hikes in power costs over the last few years. With the bottom line being threatened by ongoing running costs, suddenly manufactures are focusing on making equipment which is appealing to customers due to being energy efficient.
As an example, the headline feature of this high end Sun Microsystems server? Its power consumption.

At a rough guess, I’d say the DC London office is probably running at a consumption of roughly 30 kilowatts, not including heating. My attempts to turn off the odd 60 watt light bulb in empty rooms doesn’t really dent that too much. The real killer is all computer equipment and environmental systems required to run them. I’m aiming to reduce this by at least 10 kilowatts by summer next year.

I learned a lesson in power in the late 90’s, and happened to be part of a conversation with the head of IT for a major US investment bank with thousands of employees in London. He mentioned he was planning to scrap all of the London CRT monitors (perhaps 5000 monitors), and replace them all with TFT flat screens. At this point in time, the cost of 17″ flat screen monitors was a far cry from now - thousands of pounds per unit. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to do it. Then he explained - TFTs use less power than CRTs, and more importantly, generate significantly less heat. The cost reductions in lower electricity bills for the units themselves was a plus, but the real deciding factor was the various building’s air-conditioning could be run at a much lower output. The savings from these factors would pay for the equipment in 2-3 years.

Seeing the bigger picture like this is important, and figuring out ways to reduce power usage is something I now do as a mater of course, rather than as an afterthought.

Virtualisation systems are great for this - why have seven 500 watt servers running in a room when you can have one with seven virtual environments running on it?

I’m still going to turn off those 60w lights. But there’s other ways I can cut power usage too, and everyone should start thinking like this.

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