Green ICT from the ANU in Canberra, Australia.

I skyped Sam Fernandes, of the Green ICT dept at the Australian National University (ANU) two nights ago to catch up on what his institution had been doing to green their ICT systems. I had sent Sam the Suste-IT tool 12 months ago after he'd heard about it and The SUSTE-TECH project, from a colleague who'd attended the 2010 ACTS conference in Melbourne. Sam started using the Suste-IT tool but like many energy monitoring schemes, gathering the required data on numbers, energy consumption and operation times of ICT equipment proved too time consuming. Sam and his colleagues at the ANU have since created a programme that can detect and locate the various pieces of ICT equipment and then record their energy use. While the programme is still in its design stage it has already proved more than useful when trying to gather and monitor ICT related energy use and calculate the carbon footprint of the hundreds of ICT devices on campus. So far they have managed to estimate the energy consumption of over 22,000 ICT devices in operation across ANU's Canberra campus. The tool has identified the use of 7,600 desktops, 11,000 servers and 746 printers. The tool is being developed further with the help of Macanta, a business and management consultancy firm in Melbourne. ANU are working on improving the accuracy of the results and once fully developed, the tool may be able to generate reports that provide information about the carbon profile of ICT. The team is also working on developing the tool to provide information on the location of ICT devices across campus. I sent Sam the link to JISC's Greening of ICT projects in the hope that he and his team of researchers become inspired by the results of the JISC projects or better still decide to collaborate with JISC in the future. For more information on what ANU are doing to green their campuses' and what ground breaking research is being carried out, click on the following link; http://greenict.anu.edu.au/ , or contact NHogan@eauc.org.uk