Green Tech Buyer

Things that blink, buzz and whir – basically everything that touches the internet - tend to require a great deal of energy to accomplish whatever it is they’re groaning on about. After lighting retrofits, IT represents the largest operational energy savings opportunity, and it’s starting to get increased attention from cash-strapped and environmentally conscious finance, technology and facilities managers. Like most energy saving technology initiatives, reducing the amount of energy consumed by computers, monitors, switches and servers doesn’t have the public relations appeal of flashy solar panels or wind turbines, but it does come with easily tracked steps to lowering utility bills and trimming the corporate carbon footprint down a few sizes.

Here’s an overview of Green IT Solutions:

End Points: The ENERGY STAR program has made it fairly simple to select energy efficient devices, whether it be refrigerators or the jumbo monitors now required by engineering departments who insist their programmers be outfitted with enough gaudy screen space to rival trading desk turrets. Just about every name-brand computer and networking equipment manufacturer has made the effort to produce ENERGY STAR approved products that perform at the same level as traditional options requiring more energy to operate. Scrapping all existing resources that don’t have an ENERGY STAR label probably isn’t prudent, but as the plumbing of your network infrastructure gradually becomes outdated, it only makes sense to purchase appliances produced with energy efficiency in mind. It’s one of the few situations where greener purchasing is almost unavoidable.

Control Systems: The rules of automating controls for electronics of all varieties are pretty simple; If it’s not being used, turn down the juice. This applies to lighting, HVAC and IT operations, but inserting intelligent energy management into an IT network is less immediately intuitive than motion sensors and thermostats. There are more moving parts that each serve as particular end-user in a different capacity. Coordinating efforts to ensure computers, monitors, routers, switches, printers, scanners and copiers all play together in a way that minimizes their energy use without sacrificing availability is an emerging niche in the green industry, and GreenTechBuyer is working with several of the leading organizations specializing in on-demand green IT solutions.

Data Centers: Hosting facilities are dotting the countryside worldwide wherever massive warehouses can be constructed with sufficiently hearty access to the utility grid, public switched telephone network (PSTN), fiber optics and staff capable of making sure everything stays cool and operational.  Facility operators are feeling the social and economic squeeze as the march towards a ‘cloud based’ IT architecture continues to eliminate in-house server warehousing, and data centers proportionally increase as a percentage of total IT energy expenditure. Making these energy-sucking monsters more efficient through lighting controls, cooling system upgrades and intelligent equipment selection is one of the most clear examples of the hallowed ‘triple bottom line’ benefits of ‘going green’. Any data center worth its rack space should be well on its way to maximum energy efficiency, because reducing costs will be necessary to compete as options expand for increasingly savvy potential customers.

Corporate CTOs, CIOs, Facility Directors and Sustainability Officers should be addressing energy efficiency with the same operational imperative as bandwidth requirements and data storage capacity. Green IT solutions are a crucial aspect of running an efficient and socially responsible organization, and technologists who are early in their career would be wise to add a measure of energy auditing expertise to the resume as a marketable skill they bring to the table.

If your organization needs help greening your IT operations, GreenTechBuyer is here to help by matching you with the top companies in the business.

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Green technology professionals and news publications throw around the term ‘Smart Grid’ like the rest of the world knows what we’re talking about, but the reality is it’s neither an intuitive term to figure out on your own nor a concept easily comprehended based on cursory explanation. Contrary to similarly broad industry terms such as ‘green technology’, ‘sustainable building’, ‘clean technology’, ‘renewable energy’ and ‘alternative fuel sources’ whose definitions were discussed in a previous post, ‘ Smart Grid’ refers to a more specific set of principles and systems working in harmony to re-create the power distribution infrastructure. In this post we’ll attempt to explain the Smart Grid concept in layman’s terms that readers can make their own for cocktail party fodder and equivalent semi-formal occasions where a little base-level enlightenment goes a long way.

Let’s start with the traditional power grid, which we will refer to as ‘simple’ (dumb seemed too harsh) as opposed to ‘smart’. In its most basic and common form, utility companies generate electricity – usually by burning coal stripped from the countryside and sending billows of smog into the air, but also sometimes from clean energy sources – and then charge ‘rate-payers’ (what they coldly call customers) for the amount of electricity they consume. Whether it’s a residential or commercial property, the process is strictly unidirectional; consumers pay for a constant on-demand supply from a single entity. Sure, this ignores gasoline, propane and other gases along with the rare solar, wind or geothermal installation that feeds directly into a structure’s power system, but let’s leave that off the table at this point for the sake if simplification.

In the emerging world of a Smart Grid, the production and consumption of energy will transform from a single-direction process to a hyper-connected web of producers, storage mechanisms and consumers. A home may harvest its own solar energy, consume what it needs, and then, depending on which made more economic sense, either save the leftovers for later or sell the remaining units of energy back into the grid at a premium to be consumed by somebody else. Now, consider that this home may need to take on the responsibility of powering a charging station for an electric vehicle (EV) requiring significant juice to restore its batteries after a long commute to and from work. In the ‘simple’ grid system, everybody plugging in their EV in the early evening would cause massive stress to the resources of the single energy supplier, causing frequent blackouts and extremely high rates at times of peak demand. For those with an IT background, it’s analogous to early problems with internet congestion when all the kids got home from school and started playing video games online.

If the last two paragraphs get too nebulous, just consider it this way:

• The spread of renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, geo-thermal, (depending on your definition) nuclear) means that individual property owners will be able to supply their own energy rather than relying strictly on the utility company.


• Utility companies are going to need new ways of supplying energy to accommodate the decreased reliance on (mostly foreign) oil that accompanies EVs hitting the mainstream.


• Individual energy producers will need new mechanisms for selling and storing their excess energy.


• Everybody will need new tools for optimizing how and when they use energy within a new infrastructure that entails evolving demand patterns and distribution channels.

A series of follow-up posts in coming weeks will cover more granular aspects of how the emergence of Smart Grid technology will impact the daily lives and operations of homes and businesses, including Smart Meters, Charging Stations, Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), Feed-In Tariffs (FITs), Home Area Networks and the rapidly innovative world of local energy storage. Subscribe to our newsletter and/or RSS above, and be sure to check out our Resources Page as well to learn more in the meantime.

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