Vertatique has been covering the GreenICT implications of America's conversion to digital television (DTV) for the past couple of years: consumer e-waste, broadcaster e-waste, and consumer energy consumption*.

We noted in 2008 the EPA estimated there were 99.1 million (analog) TVs in storage at the end of 2007. This number has been revived in recent DTV conversion stories that rarely note it is a 2007 statistic likely to be significantly altered by the conversion completed in June 2009.

One can anticipate that energy/environmental impact might become a consideration in future e-infrastructure policy decisions and the DTV experience could provide valuable data, so three questions come to mind:

The search for data about TV stations' energy consumption elicited a comment from an industry colleague that it is "miniscule" compared to that of the station's viewers. How would we go about calculating the impact of a local station audience?

Ethernet links are another product area where we pay an energy/heat/carbon price for speed. IEEE Spectrum reported last year that network interface controllers in computers and switching gear consume over 5 terawatt-hours per year in the United States alone. 1/Gb/s links consume 4W more than their 100 Mb/s counterparts and the upcoming 10 Gb/s link could consume 10-20W more.

Here are some public data centers and ISPs offering various shades of green computing

Many reports that are publicized on Vertatique and elsewhere are free, but some are from paid content providers. It becomes difficult to evaluate these when all one has are the publicity assets, which by their nature tend to raise more questions than they answer. A recent prediction on trans-Atlantic bandwidth capacity, picked up by the popular media and amplified in the tweet-o-sphere, provides a case in point.

Beyond internal efforts, leadership organizations can engage stakeholders and others in their enterprise ecologies. I recently noted NewsCorp's efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of their own DVD productions. Of equal note is the investment they have made to create and publish sustainability resources for other media producers.

Printing web pages can be a frustrating experience, yielding both poor layouts and wasted paper. @greenit recently called attention to three utilities purporting to reduce print waste, one desktop-based and two online. The Vertatique home page can be challenging to to print since it is a dynamic assembly from an underlying content management system (CMS), rather than a hard-coded HTML page, so I used it for a quick test of the two online utilities.

IEEE Spectrum's Tech Titans Building Boom is a wide-ranging looking into the mega data center phenomenon - the surge in the construction of facilities holding tens of thousands, even 100K+, servers. The article has a wealth of interesting details, some of which are noted below, but doesn't address the larger sustainability issues - business or environmental. Will this herald a a new generation of online and cloud services? Or will it, like the fiber optic surge of the 1990s, result in capacity that overshoots demand and causes a recession within the supplier community?

Widespread computer use in developing countries runs right into power consumption and resource issues, so Vertatique follows developments in this area with keen interest. UK organization Computer Aid recently completed testing of low-power computers with ZDNet-UK and three African Universities.

I was asked during my HPA sustainable media session to compare the carbon footprint of a movie delivered by DVD versus one delivered by streaming. It was a good question, but one that required much research.  Here's the first half of the answer.