Publicity for the Green ICT project

Publicity for the project and its results include:

(1) part of a special feature in Times Higher Education on 12 May 2011 under “Green goals”; 

(2) in the SusteIT electronic newlsetter for August 2011 under “ICT energy use in London HEIs”;

(3) online on 17 August 2011 at Greenbiz.com under “Lessons in Green IT from London Schools”, and

(4) a quote in the SusteIT  briefing paper on powering down personal computers for September 2011.

I've also been invited to take part in an evening discussion on Sustainable ICT to be held on September 14 at the London School of Economics - more details and registration (£20 for non-members) can be found at the Net Impact London Professional.

Green ICT Project Final Report

The Final Report for the Green ICT project can be downloaded at: http://bit.ly/mD1NZr.

From a sample of 12 London universities and higher education colleges, the project estimated London universities:

• have an energy use of 170 million kWh per year
• pay annual electricity costs of about £20.4 million
• contribute 91 kilotonnes each year in CO2 emissions.

Carbon emissions by London universities are estimated
to:

• form 32% of emissions by the UK higher education sector
• equal 10% of emissions from the London Borough of Hackney
• provide 0.2% of emissions by the Greater London Authority.

There is also a PDF at the link for a leaflet summarising the project findings.

The project is now closed but we hope to secure some form of follow-on funding to extend work from the intial 10 month baseline project started in June 2010.

Green ICT best practices seminar

A joint London Higher/EAUC meeting on best practices in Green ICT was held on 10 February 2011 and the speakers covered PC powerdown, printing services, thin clients, design of data centres, building refurbishment and co-location and cloud services.

The presentations are available for downloading at the project website.

Green ICT Workshop

The event focused on initial analyses of data on energy used by ICT services in universities and higher education colleges. Drivers and options for implementing Green ICT measures were also discussed. Powerpoint presentations can be downloaded from the GrILH webpage.

Green ICT events in London

London Universities Environmental Group (LUEG): 11 January 2011
Green ICT workshop at the London School of Economics from 10:00 to 12:30.

GrILH Workshop: 25 January 2011
Discuss carbon toolkit returns, barriers and opportunities for Green ICT and funding priorities. For project participants only.

GrILH Seminar: 10 February 2011
Talks on practical implementation of Green ICT measures including data centres, procurement and the London Re:Fit programme. Other suggestions welcome. For more information email paresh.shah@londonhigher.ac.uk.

Recent Reports from JISC and HEFCE

Briefing paper on Salix funding for ICT energy efficiency, see also www.goodcampus.org for presentations, events and news about Green ICT for the HE sector;

Environmental and Organisational Implications of Cloud Computing from the JISC-funded project at University of Strathclyde;

Student perspectives on technology – demand, perceptions and training needs, report to HEFCE by NUS, see also a blog commentary on the report here;

Study of UK Online Learning (comments on difficulty of finding online study information from HEI websites), report to HEFCE by the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford.

Visualising Data

Apologies for the silence in the last couple of weeks due to jury service and catching up with the Browne Review and CSR announcements.

Over the last couple of years the push for release of public data has borne fruit and the Greater London Authority held a really interesting seminar on 27 October to show how data can be made visually informative and help identify social, economic and policy challenges.

There were presentations on the Guardian's Datablog and Datastore, GLA's London Datastore and UCL's research at CASA including SurveyMapper, It's a memory thing and MapTube. There was also a demonstration of two new Google products under development - Public Data Explorer, with a limited number of data tables to look at for the moment, and Fusion Tables which allows upload and customisable sharing of datasets.

An advantage of having public datastores is that web and digital media developers can help provide collective effort to analyse and display data, such as this interactive visualisation on carbon emissions in London from DECC local authority statistics.