We've been tracking the potential of "energy harvesting" to power devices without conventional batteries or grid connections since 2011. The latest market entrants demonstrate this segment continues to expand to meet the need son the Internet of Things (Iot).

Sol Chip's "Everlasting Solar Battery" "...integrates all the components required — in a single battery unit — to harvest and supply sustainable solar/light energy to low-power applications." Sol Chip was recognized as a 2016 Sustainia 100 solution. The Sustainia citation noted the potential impact on IoT e-waste "...by limiting the need to continuously replace batteries and reducing the associated costs and waste."

ICT facilities are becoming increasingly innovative in reusing their waste heat, a trend we first identified in 2009. This has been strongest in Europe, where many municipalities have district heating infrastructures into which facilities can transfer excess heat. Our latest example, from Switzerland, is just this sort of arrangement.

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.

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.

Green ICT articles cite a wide range of variances between energy costs per square foot for data centers and for normal office space. Vertatique uses the range cited by Measuring and Managing Data Center Use: "energy costs per square foot that are 10 to 30 times that of typical office buildings"