Is SA IT too yellow to go green?

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 06 Feb 2008

The Department of Minerals and Energy has moved with unusual vigour to publish regulations in terms of the Electricity Regulation Act of 2006 "to minimise electricity load-shedding and blackouts, thereby improving the quality of supply".

The three-page document contains a raft of prescriptions - but none that immediately affect the IT industry, despite worries that some parts of the sector - principally data centres - are notoriously power-hungry.

The public has until 25 February to comment on moves to compel Eskom to require South Africans to fit solar heaters to their homes, thermal blankets to existing geysers and bans the lighting of empty buildings at night and street lights by day.

The regulations also provide for the installation of devices in buildings to allow licensees - Eskom and local authorities - to remotely control heating, ventilation and cooling systems, arguably also those needed to keep server rooms chilled. However, switching off data centre air-conditioning may cause the equipment to overheat and malfunction - or force a server shutdown that would bring business to a standstill.

While the ICT industry - and data centres - are not the biggest demand-side culprits, UPS-maker American Power Conversion (APC) says as much as 45% of power used by the average data centre is used for cooling, which is up to 1.5 times the energy required to power the IT equipment. "Therefore, cooling strategies are a key starting point for achieving greater efficiencies."

So the higher the proportion of energy expended powering IT - as opposed to air-conditioning - the higher the efficiency of the facility.

Until recently, "green IT" was not a major concern in SA, but this will change thanks to Eskom's supply-side problems. Major chip vendors Intel and AMD, as well as original equipment manufacturers such as Sun, HP, IBM and many others have for some time now been punting energy-efficient data centre solutions that use less power and generate less heat, therefore, requiring less cooling.

Pale green

ITWeb last year reported that the National Energy-Efficiency Agency, a division of the state-owned Central Energy Fund, was working with Sun Microsystems to case study local energy-efficient IT.

Barry Bredenkamp, the fund's acting general operations manager, at the time said little attention has been paid to the amount of electricity used by technology. However, he noted that over half of the power used by Megawatt Park - Eskom's headquarters - went to running its IT. With this in mind, a pilot project would be run early this year to measure electricity consumption with and without Sun equipment.

Vito Bonafede, Sun's regional director for sub-Saharan Africa, added that local businesses need some motivation to join the energy-saving cause. Eskom may now have served up that motivation - in abundance.

APC says a recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US found the world's power consumption for servers and data centre-related equipment was 14 000MW. Johannesburg consumes 3 600MW a day - about the output of a single Eskom power station - while the Mozal aluminium smelter uses 2 100MW a day.