Can Green IT break the Jevons Paradox?

The IT industry has made great strides in improving energy efficiency but, as Andy Lawrence of The 451 Group asks, can it cut power use when demand for computing power keeps rising?

The Eco-efficient IT movement has come a long way in the past year: a wide variety of energy efficient products have been introduced; a number of influential industry organisations have been formed and are exercising influence; and a slate of new ways to measure or benchmark energy efficiency have been proposed or introduced.

Progress is most notable in the US, where the red-in-tooth-and-claw fossil fuel chompers of the Bush heyday are now distinctly quieter than the new environmentalists (although they certainly still exist).

At the Green Grid conference in San Francisco in February, for example, hundreds of companies attended, there was no debate about the reality or causes of climate change (since that argument is over) and two American government departments, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, both distinguished themselves by introducing new initiatives to encourage energy efficiency in datacentres. Almost every face at the Green Grid displayed sincerity, optimism, intelligence and the ability to command resources.

In spite of all this, it is perhaps time to sound some notes of caution. Green IT over the past year has, quite rightly, focused on the lowest hanging fruit – energy efficiency. Energy use in IT is, and will remain for many years, absurdly profligate. It has been estimated, for example, that of every 100 volt-amps generated at the grid, only six per cent ends up driving a server

Big efforts are underway to improve IT energy efficiency, and we at the 451 Group believe that IT energy reduction of 30 to 50 per cent is possible, although ambitious, in most organisations, based on the current workload. And such is the innovation now underway that ultimately, improvements beyond this will eventually be possible. The fact that energy is becoming more expensive is adding an economic imperative to the energy efficiency drive.

But will all this ultimately reduce energy use by IT? That is a troubling question: while it should be a definitive "yes", it is not that easy. The so-called Jevons Paradox suggests that as a resource becomes more efficient to use, demand goes up, not down. That is because, as a proportion of total costs, it becomes cheaper, and so people use more.

Energy prices will almost certainly rise in most countries over the next three decades, so the effect of increased efficiency will be constantly negated in the electricity bills, helping to provide an economic reason to find further efficiencies. But there is no suggestion, from any green tinged IT supplier of any kind, that there should be less processing, or less storage, or less network switching. No one is saying we have to curb our use of video, or mobile devices, or online banking, or eGovernment. On the contrary, suppliers are shipping more processing power for less energy use. Moore's Law, which describes the IT industry's ability to consistently produce ever smaller, more powerful devices, may at some point falter, but the suppliers will find other ways to innovate to meet demand.

The net result of all this activity is that the IT industry – and this includes the user community – is enjoying a phosphorescent green glow based almost entirely on the fairly narrow metric of IT energy efficiency, which may never actually translate into real CO2 emissions reductions from IT.

Energy efficiency is, of course, very important and very desirable. But it is not the complete story: more attention needs to be paid elsewhere.

First, IT is, of course, being used to make many important activities more efficient, and that includes making them more energy and carbon efficient. But the efficiencies introduced by, say, a videoconferencing system, or an aircraft yield management system, or an online road tax form, are rarely accurately measured, or tracked back or reconciled with IT energy use.

Second, IT suppliers are currently describing their products as green, and according to some reports actually selling more, because they are more energy efficient than the models they replace. But what about the carbon footprint of manufacture, supply and disposal associated with those systems? From a total CO2 point of view, at what point should a server be replaced by a more energy efficient one? At this point, the environmentalist inside every computer salesman may fall silent, since the right answer may not be in the next quarter, but in the next decade.

Efforts are underway to produce better figures around this, but they are very patchy. To be fair, companies such as Dell and HP are aware of this issue and are trying to bring down the carbon footprint throughout the lifecycle. Even so, it is important the energy efficiency metrics are supplemented by carbon footprint metrics if green IT mark 2 is to be convincing.

Some people believe that IT will always suck up extra energy, just as it has done with bandwidth and processing power. This raises a third issue: at some point IT users and suppliers will have to use energy more intelligently, favouring renewable energy. This is relatively new territory: solar power data centers and wind-up computers are generally dismissed, while use of hydro power for data centers has changed little, since the power was there already. But it is an opportunity: IT suppliers, and their biggest customers, can much more positively contribute to the efficient generation and management of energy production, as well as its use, probably at a local or even miniaturised level. In Green IT, as in Green business generally, every little bit helps.

Andy Lawrence is research director for Eco-efficient IT at IT analyst firm The 451 Group