IT sector needs to keep getting greener: Alcatel-Lucent study
Without efficiency, tech could make a mess of greenhouse targets
Posted in Management, 11th March 2013 02:28 GMT
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The IT industry needs to work on efficiency to curb its unrelenting demand for electricity – and even if it does, by 2020 it will be responsible for four per cent of the world's greenhouse gas output, according to an Alcatel-Lucent-funded study.
The assessment, conducted by BIO Intelligence Services, suggests that the four per cent outcome is something of a best case. Its sobering – if unlikely – assessment is that without efficiency measures, the IT and communications sectors would generate nearly 330 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions by 2020. With efficiency measures, output would instead be 1.43 gigatonnes of CO2 - a CAGR of six per cent, which is well below adoption of IT and the rate of growth of Internet traffic.
The reason The Register treats the worst-case as unlikely is that, as the report points out, 330 Gt worth of emissions would have the tech sector generating seven times the global greenhouse emission target for 2020 – it's more than ten times the 2010 emissions from energy consumption as documented at the US Energy Information Administration here.
In other words, the tech sector has to find ways to curb its consumption, if for no other reason than continuing to follow its current trajectory would make the availability of energy, not just emissions, a growth constraint.
The worst case is based on a high-end network traffic growth scenario by Bell Labs, in which 2020's total global telecommunications traffic would reach 400 times its level in 2007, and an absolute growth in power per user to more than 100 watts.
If the study is correct, achieving the necessary efficiencies will be a challenge: “The improvements that are possible in current technologies are expected to slow and then stop by the year 2017”, the report states – which means new technologies and efficiencies will be needed.
It's not all gloom, however: if the tech sector can stay within the “four per cent of greenhouse emissions” target, the study's authors believe IT and communications will ultimately save more emissions than they contribute.
Not all of the energy efficiencies need new technologies, the paper states. For example, infrastructure sharing – anathema to many mobile carriers, and in fact only common under either financial or regulatory pressure – is an obvious way to save power.
Cloud computing – also a form of infrastructure sharing – is also treated favourably by the study, which says it can reduce emissions by up to 90 per cent for small (sub-100 seat) deployments, falling to a best-case of 60 per cent for deployments in the 10,000-seat range.
Looking at the numbers
However, the key question, it appears to The Register, revolves around traffic growth predictions, since these are a fundamental variable in the study: how realistic is it to predict that 2020 network traffic could be 400 times 2007 traffic?
If I use Cisco's Visual Networking Index as a benchmark, the Bell Labs traffic growth forecast appears to be very optimistic. The monthly traffic recorded for 2007 in the company's 2008 VNI was around 6,500 PB per month, and the current forecast is for global IP traffic to pass 106,000 PB per month by 2016. Averaging the CAGR from 2007 to 2016, I get a value of 37.12 per cent.
If growth from 2016 to 2020 maintained that 37.12 per cent CAGR, 2020 traffic would reach 378,000 PB per month – around 59 times the 2007 traffic, far short of the 400-fold increase that the Alcatel-Lucent / BIO Intelligence Services predicts as the maximum growth rate.
However, the study provides a metric that can be applied back to the Cisco-based prediction: CO2 emission on a per-byte basis. The high-end forecast is for traffic to reach around 6.2x1010 Terabytes per year (thanks for mixing units there, authors). The short version is that on the same power curve, if traffic reached my extended Cisco VNI-based forecast, emissions would reach 42 Gigatonnes rather than 330, without efficiency strategies.
That's still a considerable emission growth, and still well ahead of what's desirable, since the global target is for just 45 Gigatonnes of emissions from electricity consumption.
The report can be found here. ®
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COMMENTS
In the UK this is very serious given how we've been living with the stable foundation of nuclear energy for years which will decline very quickly. Good old Labour decided that a few windmills would fix the problem and so we'll be without a decent nuclear power supply for a while.
We'll end up buying electric from France and paying more.
Sobering
No doubt there will be those that question the validity of this assesment. But we've seen a massive growth in use of telecoms and that needs the infrastructure to support the growing demand. People insist on creating videos, photos, music files et al. which they than upload to the cloud for the world (in reality, a couple of friends) to share.
An increasing amount of this is now in HD, making the files much larger and taking up yet more space; and it's stored on systems spread around the world that run 24 / 365 just in case someone wants to look at it during a drunken midnight session once a year.
Add to that, the growth in the demand for the services in the developing world and it doesn't seem that unlikely after all.
(Grumpy Old Fart time again)
4%?
I call shenanigans.
The only way the 4 percent make sense is if you count ovens and tumbledryers as IT because they have chips somewhere in them. I suspect the figures are based on the same sort of BS as aircon engineers who come round measuring each workstation as being 400 watts for quotation purposes.
Quick, someone build 10 times as many power plants, the Internet needs electricity
Power usage of network gear has been growing exponentially for decades, because it was not a significant proportion of costs, so there was little incentive to optimise for energy usage. Now it has become a significant proportion of costs, so it's time to pick all the low-hanging fruit left after years of having R&D concentrate on other things.
The ICT industry can't afford to fund a massive expansion in the world's electricity supply. Traffic would not continue to grow if such costs were passed on to end users. This study shows an exponential curve extrapolated until it becomes ridiculous.
The new Office:
