Microsoft Chief Strategist Urges IT Industry to Practice Energy Efficiency

In an interview with the Guardian, Microsoft's (News - Alert) Chief Environmental Strategist, Rob Bernard, rued the fact that businesses were not doing enough to become energy efficient. He wanted to use the company's network of partners and the IT sector to expand the energy efficiency gains that had already accrued in the company.

Bernard’s sentiments were released by Envido, a U.K.’s  provider of energy, low-carbon and sustainability solutions for private and public sector organizations and helps clients reduce carbon emissions, saving energy, money and boosting performance in the process.

In November 2010, Microsoft commissioned a life-cycle analysis to determine the extent of impact a particular product or service had on the environment throughout its life and concluded that cloud computing was an area where energy efficiency could be achieved to the extent 30 percent and even 90 percent in the case of smaller operations.

Currently, Bernard said, although the IT industry was progressive and proactive in the cause of energy efficiency, the majority failed to address the issue at the levels they were actually capable of. Monitoring and driving energy reduction was not being actively undertaken.

Coordination of IT departments and the establishment of a governance model were necessary to tackle the perennial problem of non-payment of energy bills. Hence, what was actually required was a marked corporate behavioral change rather than a technical one.

Data centers, in Bernard's opinion, were power guzzling units with "clouds" of gigantic computing facilities that stored digital data. Most of them were operating at power utilization efficiency of 2.0 that was way too high and needed to be brought down. This implied that for every two electrons that came into the building only one went into computation while the other went into air-conditioning and lights.