Unfortunately, individual agencies appear to be struggling with that initial work. Asset management tools exist to help with this process but these systems need to be filled with information before they can be of any use That takes time and resources. JouleX, and Triton, believe their technology can help with this initial asset discovery process, as well as with long term energy efficiency monitoring and control.

However, they are far from being the only game in town and all the other major IT consultants will be hoping to grab a slice of the ongoing consolidation work.

JouleX alliance aims to benefit from federal datacenter squeeze

Energy management startup JouleX and sustainability consultant Triton Federal Solutions announced a partnership in the third quarter of 2011. Triton is acting as a reseller for the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) products, and the partnership could help JouleX generate sales of its technology to US government agencies. The government plans to consolidate up to 800 of its 2,000 datacenters and improve the efficiency of the remainder. Savings could be up to $23.71bn per year. However, new efficient technologies will be required to identify assets for consolidation and optimize the remaining sites. Securing a slice of this effort could be lucrative for JouleX and Triton.

The 451 Group subscribers can access the report @ The 451 Group.com. Non-subscribers can get apply for access here.

In the third quarter of 2011, Dell announced that it had updated the warranties of some of its existing datacenter IT equipment to cover it for operation at higher temperatures and humidity. These newly certified devices are collectively known as the Dell Fresh Air Cooling range. The equipment will only be covered at the new higher temperatures for limited periods of time, but Dell says this is sufficient for most use cases. The Fresh Air range is designed to help companies cut datacenter operating costs by reducing their use of mechanical chillers.

The 451 Group subscribers can access the report @ The 451 Group.com. Non-subscribers can get apply for access here.

Silicon.com: CIOs Turned off By Power Management

IT departments are resisting the rollout of PC power-management technology as they believe the downtime and productivity losses associated with implementing it are too great a risk.

And this opposition is likely to remain until IT can directly benefit from the cost savings that greater energy efficiency can generate, according to analyst house The 451 Group.

Power-management software allows desktop computers to be turned off remotely to ensure they aren’t drawing power when not in use. This means PCs aren’t left on overnight or when people don’t come into work, significantly reducing energy costs and carbon emissions.

For more go to Silicon.com

BusinessGreen.com: Corporations Turn On TO PC Turn Off

The global market for PC power management technologies will continue to expand “at a pretty rapid rate”, according to a major new report confirming that the energy savings delivered by automated PC turn-off technologies can deliver a return on investment in less than six months for many organisations.

The study from IT industry analysts The 451 Group, entitled PC Power Management – Measuring, Monitoring and Managing Client Energy Consumption, concluded that despite the rapid expansion of the PC power management market in recent years the technology has still achieved market penetration of just 20 per cent, leaving plenty of room for expansion.

For more go to BusinessGreen.com

Thanks to eWEEK Europe UK for the coverage too – site seems to be down though so can’t put the links in yet.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a recent event in Budapest, my home-town, at the Central European University (an institution established by international financier George Soros). The event was a talk by the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Fatih Birol who was on hand to provide some perspectives on factors shaping global energy markets.

For more go to: N Plus One

Would be great to raise some more sponsorship for Action For Children ahead of Byte Night – and anyone who wants to donate can do so here:

Each year, at least 75,000 children and young people experience homelessness. One in three attempt suicide and 1 in 7 young runaways are physically or sexually assaulted (this figure rises to almost 1 in 2 after a week).

With your support, not only can the charity help keep thousands of children and young people off the streets and away from the risk of physical and sexual assault, it will also help them build better lives with secure accommodation, education and training opportunities.

In the dog days of summer you might, like me, find yourself with a bit more time on your hands than usual. Given the standard of the average British summer, spending all of it frolicking in the great outdoors isn’t always an option. Sitting down to watch a few sci-fi classics is one alternative – albeit a geeky one. But beware, rather than escapism, some of these films have a way of focusing the mind on real-world issues in an unexpected way.

In the dystopian imaginings of two of my favourite films, The Terminator and Blade Runner, irresponsible application of technology is to blame for ravaged landscapes and a distinct lack of anything warm and furry, or green and leafy for that matter. So rather than being immersed in cyborgs, guns and high-octane action, I found myself musing on the relationship between tech and the environment.

Avatar: Tech vs Environment

High-tech and the natural world just don’t mix, seems to be the message of a lot of sci-fi. In a head to head contest one is going to come off worse and, usually, it’s the green stuff that suffers. Most recently Avatar demonstrated this violent opposition of technology and natural habitat with primitive people defending their forest home from a tech-dependent human army. One of the key parts of the film involves a sacred tree being torched in the name of progress – a crude metaphor maybe but an effective one.

The irony of the environmental message at the heart of Avatar and the warnings of techno-meddling from films such as The Terminator, is that the films themselves are the product of technological advancements. Avatar is seen as the bleeding edge of 3D technology, with the TV industry pinning its hopes on the movie to drive the next wave of upgrades. Environmental groups have already pointed out the inherent contradiction that a film with an environmental message may potentially spark a tech-refresh with all its e-waste generating implications.

The relationship between technology and environmental sustainability is obviously more nuanced than popular culture would have us believe. The massive green elephant in the room is the whole rise of so-called clean technology and renewable energy – from wind turbines to hydrogen fuel cells – which are all dependent on new and innovative technology. Overhauling power grids and the way consumers monitor their energy use will save huge amounts of carbon. But this application of so-called smart meters and grids isn’t possible without upgrading existing infrastructure and rolling-out new technology. Counter-intuitively, to lessen the impact of tech on the environment we have to build more of it.

But another aspect to the complex relationship between the environment and technological progress is that technology – specifically IT – has the potential to not only become more sustainable through refinement but actually lessen the impact of other man-made activities. A power-efficient data centre which utilises renewable energy, such as the Other World Computing (OWC) facility in Woodstock Illinois, is not only inherently sustainable but the tools it could provide – email, web collaboration and video conferencing – replace the need for more carbon intensive activities such as air-travel.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

Installing an exercise bike connected to a generator in a hotel foyer so guests can pedal for their supper is one way to put green policies into action. But while this recent experiment at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Copenhagen Towers shows that guests are happy to expend energy to save the planet, there is still uncertainty about how far this commitment extends in fiscal terms.

Amid an unsteady economic recovery, and concerns over a potential double-dip recession, the hospitality sector along with other industries are looking for evidence that investment in sustainability makes business sense. Ultimately, everyone wants to know just how much customers care.

Finding an answer is not easy, though that hasn’t stopped plenty of organisations from trying. Consumer research specialists, such as Mintel and Ipsos Mori, have carried out numerous studies to track green spending, and the markets attempt to measure the financial performance of companies that meet corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards with the FTSE4Good Index and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI).

Fore more go to: Greenhotelier.org

The long awaited Smart Metering Implementation Programme Prospectus was released this week in the last proper splurge of business before the dog days of summer. Not much of a fanfare then for what the government admits will be one of the biggest public sector tech projects of recent times.

But then any news is good news right now with the silly season looming – another week and the tech press will be awash with the usual summer space fillers of “How to stay connected to the office while on vacation” or “Top tech books to take to the beach”. While it might be exciting to engage the conspiracy synapses and imagine government spin-doctors trying to bury some Machiavellian smart meter sub-plot – the truth is probably just that this much material takes time to accumulate.

And what a pile there is. Never mind summer reading, anyone interested in how the government intends to pull-off this feat will be eschewing Stephen King and Dean Koontz in favour of Chris Huhn. The smart meter prospectus might not be exactly beach reading material but some aspects of it seem every bit as fanciful as a bestseller.

A Fantasy Bestseller?

The most obvious example of this is the new timetable the government has set. The EU electricity and gas directives behind the UK’s smart meter push mandate 2020 as the date for the deployment. That might still be nearly ten years away but even that seemed ambitious given the small fact that the country is broke and most other large-scale public sector tech projects have been mothballed or scrapped as the coalition furiously bails out our collective life-boat. The rash of tech quangos that have been nuked in the last few weeks, together with high-profile cuts such as ID Cards and Microsoft losing its lucrative NHS deal, show exactly how much cash and good will there is available for tech projects in Whitehall right now.

Despite some pre-election stories about cosying up to Google, the coalition government has not exactly endeared itself to the tech industry so far. Even the hip games industry’s attempts to get a tax break were shot to pieces, Call-Of-Duty-style, by George Osbourne.

For more go to eWEEK Europe UK

How much is enough?

From eWEEK Europe UK:

In an earlier column, I publicly named and shamed myself for my rampant addiction to shiny new kit.

This guilt over tech consumerism had been boiling under for a while but the iPhone 4 launch proved to be the gadget which gave the camel a nasty case of lumbago. No more being sucked in by the Jobs distortion field I told myself. From now on new tech will only be purchased to replace devices that have gone to the great tech museum in the sky.

Given all the furore around the iPhone’s antenna issues, the decision to out myself turned out to be a pretty good one. Being an early adopter is always a risky strategy given the penchant of Apple and others to beta test their new kit on the live market.

So I am feeling rather smug and sustainable at the moment knowing I dodged the antenna bullet, saved some cash and avoided consigning another bit of kit to the waste-stream (albeit with a short stop-over in my bottom drawer).

Dodging The iPhone 4 Bullet

But there is a but. Even knowing all about the antenna issues and Apple’s potentially duplicitous behaviour is shipping the iPhone 4 with a fault in the first place – I still want one. The desire for shiny new – precious – things is hard-wired I suppose, and eventually I will succumb. But I am adamant that won’t be till my existing iPhone 3GS is beyond repair. So in a strategy which I guess is tech addiction’s equivalent of a nicotine patch, I bought myself a shiny new case for the old model and also downloaded Apple’ latest iPhone OS update. Hey presto – a new iPhone or something very close to it. The outside looks different and so does the software.

This tactic of modification rather than upgrading could be seen as the IT equivalent of the car body-kits and silly transfers that teenage boy-racers are so keen on. Slapping a new spoiler on your Nissan Micra is not as satisfying as owning a new Golf GTi but it helps to satiate the upgrade demons.  Moreover, improving or modifying existing kit might sound like a pointless diversion but it is actually closely allied to a more fundamental approach to electronics, domestic appliances, and even cars – repairing and reusing them for as long as possible.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK