Page 2820 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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environmental considerations, why, I ask, would the government want to pay more for IT services than it has to? If the government started looking strategically at IT, it would find it is as much about saving money as it is about being green. It is about not needlessly spending money on power when some vision, not even any significant investment, is all it takes to reduce power use in IT.
The commonwealth government Australian national audit report on sustainability in ICT practices reported that zero or thin client trials had indicated power savings of up to 83 per cent. Zero/thin clients are where, on your desk, there is just a screen and a keyboard and all the computing is done centrally in a server. That is what we used to have 20 years ago. We called them dumb terminals but now the servers are much more powerful than that and it works just the same as the desktop that we currently have on our desks.
The report found that the added benefits of zero or thin client technology were that refreshment of the desktop computers was not required as often and, of course, because you are using less power to run those desktops, you do not need to use as much power to cool the office. You do not need to use as much air-conditioning.
Sadly, however, in the estimates hearings, InTACT admitted that they had not done any modelling of the impact of thin clients. They were concerned, they did say, about possible impacts on the network but they did admit they had not actually done any modelling on this.
Reducing energy use in IT is an easy win for the ACT government. It is an easy win financially, it is an easy win from an IT security point of view and it is an easy win from an environmental point of view. And it should look to the federal government, who is working on this, to start saving power and to save money. In this context I would like to point out that the Greens support estimates committee recommendation No 26:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government investigate the potential energy and financial savings of moving the ACT Government ICT system to ‘thin client’ and ‘virtualisation’ technologies.
I would also like to point out the most important green IT decision is the purchasing or procurement decision. What is important with IT is that you purchase the right equipment and the equipment is designed to last. Most of the energy use in IT and certainly all of the production of toxic materials and toxic waste and rare elements et cetera is in the production of the equipment and then its eventual disposal.
Given that, I am concerned that the government do not appear to be concerned about the environment credentials of the products they are buying. And I was very sorry to hear that they do not use EPEAT, the electronic product environmental assessment tool. EPAT is an American system which the American government has introduced for all its purchases, in the same way as it introduced energy stars many years ago. That drove energy efficiency in Australia. EPAT is a system to help purchasers evaluate, compare and select electronic products based on their environmental attributes. The system currently covers desktop and laptop computers, workstations and computer monitors.
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