Traditional ICT facilities consume as much energy cooling their gear as powering it the first place. One solution is to re-use the waste heat.

Sep 2011: Marlow Industries has announced, "a complete range of thermoelectric-based energy harvesting devices, offering customers a low-cost, zero-maintenance power solution for wireless sensor applications…By converting small degrees of temperature difference into milliwatts of electrical power [they] can perpetually power wireless sensors for the lifetime of the application. This green innovation offers a solid-state, reliable energy source for sensors, actuators, valve solenoids and other small devices by recycling wasted heat…With new building codes requiring sophisticated lighting, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems (HVAC), 'smart' designs are key to moderating usage…builders will have a cost-effective and green alternative that will relieve resources spent powering these devices."

I've reported on data centers that have been built to LEED standards. The more I learn about LEED in practice, the more I am convinced that organizations need to carefully weigh the costs/benefits of LEED for New Construction (LEED-NC) as a Green ICT tactic. Key to the issue is that LEED 3.0 NC (LEED 2009) neither requires Energy Measurement and Verification (M&V) nor requires sustained achievement of energy benchmarks after a building is commissioned.

A datacenter built by IBM Switzerland for GIB-Solutions AG, announced in 2008 and completed in 2009, incorporates a number of innovative features.

There have been growing concerns about the misuse of PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) in PR. Uptime Institute Director Kenneth Brill weighed in with widely noted critiques a year ago. Last week, Loose Bolts blogger Michael Manos raised the specter of PUE PR becoming embedded in RFPs. But what I liked best about Manos' post was his attention to an unintended consequence of the quest for efficiency.

The production of realistic animations and effects sequences requires clusters of computers and mass storage known as "render farms". One approach to strike a balance between availability and energy consumption is to integrate power management tools into workflow. Here are two examples, along with one even more aggressive approach to green rendering.

Of all the Green ICT topics I covered at the recent Sustainable Real Estate Development Conference (SREDC), the concept of "telework centers" generated the most discussion among the real estate professionals. Telework centers are a way of bringing work to people instead of bring people to work while offering more robust infrastructure support than telecommuting from home. Learn more about telework and telecommuting from

Green ICT programs are a good way to engage stakeholders and value chain players in a common mission. For a tech-savvy crowd, a strong Green ICT web presence is critical. You risk diluting the impact if the presentation of your Green ICT initiatives are not well-integrated with your existing web presence facing each target group. This case study is about Green Energy, not Green ICT per se, but it shows what can happen when good intentions are undercut by haphazard execution. Click here for the study..

American Power Conversion (APC) published an informative white paper in 2006, Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centers, which showed that 45% of data center energy goes to dealing with waste heat. I've seen "half" frequently asserted without citation; if you have a more recent credible source, please post it as a comment.