How can Green IT be leveraged to reduce your company’s emissions?

Technology is a huge consumer of electricity and a producer of waste. The share of IT in the worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is around 4% already - and not only due to the emerging trend of integrating Generative AI into more and more products, but this number is likely to increase dramatically in the upcoming years.

Information and communication technology (ICT) is essential to most businesses. Processes and communications usually rely on a robust and reliable infrastructure. How do we now manage the balancing act of fulfilling all requirements and still proceeding in the most environmentally friendly way possible?

IT-related emissions under the GHG protocol

Before we look into concrete decarbonisation strategies, let's first look at where the typical IT-related emissions fall under the scope of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:

• Scope 1: Direct emissions from IT infrastructure owned and operated by the company, such as data centres, enterprise networks, or other on-premise operations.
• Scope 2: Indirect emissions from other companies to supply energy to the reporting organisation, such as electricity, heating and cooling for data centres, networks and end-user IT equipment.
• Scope 3: Indirect emissions along the value chain (particularly IaaS, PAAS and SaaS) or ICT equipment.

How to reduce IT emissions?

In the following sections, we'll examine ways to reduce the carbon footprint of your organisation's IT department.

Hosting emissions

There are usually two standard choices for hosting your infrastructure or software applications: either operating servers in data centres (either fully self-owned/-managed or rented server racks in colocation facilities) or using shared resources over the Internet (referenced to as "the cloud"). Let's examine the first option.

On-premises

Unless your company doesn't operate the data centre itself, you can't influence technical aspects like cooling, UPS or the usage of photovoltaics. If your company rents space in a colocation data centre, you should choose one that uses regenerative energies and has good power usage effectiveness (PUE). The PUE is the better, the closer it is to 1.

You can also reduce your carbon emissions by taking the following actions:

• Utilise your servers as much as possible. If servers are running on low CPU loads, consolidate workloads on one or only a few servers
• Leverage virtualisation, i.e. running several virtual machines on one physical server, to further improve utilisation
• Shut down unnecessary resources, like idle servers
• Use server power management features that reduce power consumption during periods of low usage
• Buy refurbished hardware (see section about Hardware Management below).

Cloud hosting

Moving to the cloud splits the responsibilities: the cloud provider (CSP) takes care of the sustainable operation of the underlying cloud infrastructure and services, e.g., by using efficient servers and cooling technology or renewable energy. This is called the 'sustainability of the cloud'. Its customers, however, need to ensure that they use it sustainably.

The cloud seemed an easy way for companies to decarbonise their IT. In the pre-AI era, most cloud providers made bold claims about becoming carbon-neutral by 2040 at the latest, and they also undertook great efforts to use renewable energy, for example.

Unfortunately, AI's insatiable hunger for energy and hardware has made these goals unlikely to be achieved. For example, Microsoft's emissions have increased by 30% in the last three years instead of decreasing. Besides carbon, the massive usage of AI has created other ecological problems, like the increased water consumption of data centres.

This means that despite all the clever marketing of the CSPs, moving to the cloud takes time to make your business greener. Additionally, the seemingly endless scalability, e.g. through auto-scaling or serverless functions, can lead to inefficient software because developers have to care less about boundaries. It is easy to solve performance problems by adding more resources as long as enough money is available. 

Numerous other resources are available for building enterprise architecture in the cloud. Some cloud providers, like Microsoft, Google, and AWS, maintain well-architected frameworks that efficiently provide valuable information on operating software in the cloud. Lately, the sustainability pillow has been added to some of these frameworks.

Criticism of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)

To highlight the efficiency of their data centres, hosting and cloud providers often use the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as a metric. While it is true that huge cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft have very energy-efficient facilities, Hosting and cloud providers often use power usage effectiveness (PUE) as a metric to highlight the efficiency of their data centres. While it is true that huge cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft have very energy-efficient facilities, focusing only on PUE is not enough.

For example, the PUE does not distinguish the carbon intensity of different energy sources. Furthermore, it measures energy consumption at the data centre level, not on servers or individual workloads. The impact of hardware life cycle management is also neglected.

Application for portfolio management

Depending on your company's size, your IT environment probably consists of hundreds or thousands of software applications supporting your business processes. Every software application has an unavoidable carbon footprint, so managing the software in use is essential.

Another challenge is the so-called Shadow IT (i.e., the plethora of tools and scripts outside the IT departments). With the availability of sophisticated Low-Code and No-Code platforms, it is possible to develop workflows and applications that can improve your business rapidly. As with most things, shadow IT comes with benefits and drawbacks. In the context of this article, the main problem is to measure emissions of software operated outside your IT environment - which is, of course, also valid for all SaaS solutions and the like. However, the emissions of these "invisible" tools will not be reported if not centrally managed.

To control your company's application portfolio, you should first set basic objectives, like reducing redundancy, increasing security, or reducing carbon emissions. Once the targets are set, you can use application rationalisation frameworks to help you achieve them.

A managed application portfolio will reduce costs, e.g. for licences or maintenance, and reduce carbon emissions through reduction of data storage, virtualisation optimisation and higher energy efficiency through lower hardware utilisation.

Hardware management

In 2022 alone, humanity produced over 62 million tonnes of electronic waste. How can companies reduce e-waste and the electricity consumption of the devices still in use?

Keeping products longer in use immediately reduces GHG emissions. The following options can extend the lifetime of hardware:

• Demand an extended product warranty to ensure support from the manufacturer
• Choose devices that are robust and durable
• Look for devices that are easy to repair and maintain (e.g., those with a modular design instead of components that are glued or soldered together)
• Buy devices with battery longevity (i.e., guaranteed charge cycles).

On an organisational level, your company has additional choices:

• Preferably, buy used and refurbished devices.
• Choose sustainable hardware manufacturers. The leading players in the market have different decarbonisation targets.
• Generally prolong hardware life cycle policies, where applicable.
• Sell old devices or donate them.

Life cycle assessments show that for end-user equipment, like laptops, roughly 80% of the carbon emissions are created during the manufacturing phase and only 20% during the usage phase. For servers, however, only approximately 15% of the carbon emissions are attributed to the manufacturing phase, while the main share is attributed to the actual usage.

For end-user devices, looking for lower production emissions, e.g., using recycled plastic, is imperative. For servers, however, buying energy-efficient devices is more critical. For the latter, certifications like the Energy Star are beneficial.

Energy efficiency plays a vital role for end-user devices, too. The Typical Energy Consumption (TEC) for laptops is approximately four times lower than that for desktop PCs, which makes a difference over the product's lifetime.

Besides buying energy-efficient hardware and using renewable energies, your company can reduce energy consumption by leveraging system power management through IT policies. For example, it could send devices to sleep after being idle for 15 minutes or switch to power-saving modes by default.

Not only end-user devices should be powered down when not in use. This can also apply to software development environments like staging or user acceptance testing environments, typically not used on weekends or overnight.

Conclusion

We cannot eliminate IT emissions, but many ways exist to significantly reduce them without compromising performance or reliability. Besides emerging legislation such as ESG or CSRD demanding action on reporting and lowering emissions, many of the measures described above can lead to considerable cost savings—another aspect supporting companies' IT practices. Other positive side effects can be the reduction of IT complexity, an improved perception of the brand, or even employee retention.