The tussle for the top of our Cool IT Leaderboard has taken its latest twist, with Google grabbing the top spot ahead of 20 other tech companies, including Cisco and Ericsson.

Pitching global IT companies against each other to find who comes out top in the fight to stop climate change, the 5th edition of the Leaderboard compares the firms on their IT Climate Solutions, IT Energy Impact and Political Advocacy.

Google is way ahead on climate solutions and energy impacts, thanks to its disclosure of its energy footprint, and for providing its impressively detailed mitigation plan for achieving emissions reductions. On top of this, Google continues to speak up on important climate change policies, and make its voice heard on the immediate need for both US and EU governments to aggressively cut emissions.

Unfortunately though, there was a notable drop in scores on political advocacy across the industry. With the urgent need for cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, tech firms are failing to speak up against that dirty energy companies guilty of stalling climate change policy debates at all levels of government. This is troubling; the IT industry is full of environmental rhetoric but simply doesn’t seem to be taking any real action. This is not tenable – the industry expanding too fast, and has too much potential for helping cut global emissions to just stand in the shadows.

Several companies dropped points for pushing vague plans to mitigate their climate footprint, and for the lack of any plans for powering their future data centres with renewable energy. To remedy these problems, companies need to become more transparent on their investments into IT solutions that work to mitigate climate change and future emissions savings goals.

However, with the possibility of introducing new climate clever solutions and expanding into emerging markets such as India, the tech business have an opportunity to create a greater demand for renewable energy that will ripple into other parts of the economy. The industry’s energy footprint is growing, and with so many new communities gaining access to mobile phones, tablets, and green building techniques that use innovative IT technology, it won’t be decreasing anytime soon.

In fact, in the SMART 2020 report released nearly four years ago, it was projected that the Internet’s energy consumption will triple by 2020. But the sector can actually make a dent in global emission cuts in that same time frame by contributing to clever climate solutions by allowing people to measure their electricity consumption. While it is exciting to see the leadership by some of the companies on the Leaderboard, like Google, it is disappointing that the industry as a whole is failing to actualize its real potential.

Is this the kind of leadership we should expect from some of the world’s most inventive people?

See the Cool IT Leaderboard for yourself

The world’s most valuable solar company said the cell’s performance, confirmed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, topped the previous world record of 16.7 percent set in 2001.

A solar cell’s efficiency is the percentage of sunlight that ends up being converted to electricity.

The announcement by First Solar, which rarely trumpets the performance of its test cells, comes a few months after rising competitor General Electric said one of its cadmium telluride modules had recorded the highest efficiency ever for the photovoltaic solar industry’s lowest cost technology.

GE in April said its record-setting panel logged an efficiency of 12.8 percent. On Tuesday, however, First Solar said one of its modules recorded an efficiency of 13.4 percent. Both were confirmed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL.

Solar cells are packaged together to make modules, and that process reduces their overall efficiency.

But the results of a single test cell or module in the lab vary dramatically from those of the same products rolling off the production line.

First Solar, for instance, said the average efficiency of its modules in the first quarter was 11.7 percent. The company has a goal to reach efficiencies of 13.5 percent to 14.5 percent by the end of 2014 in full-scale production.

Cadmium telluride panels are cheaper to produce, but less efficient, than the crystalline silicon panels that dominate the market. Commercial efficiency percentages for silicon-based panels range from the high teens to low 20s.

Story Copyright (c) 2011 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Cogenra plans to install these “hybrid” solar arrays at businesses that use large quantities of electricity and water, and then charge them for supplying both. The company has not released an estimate for the cost per watt of its electricity, but it says that the cost of heated water will be considerably less than the norm.

At the winery, owned by Sonoma Wine Company, several parabolic dishes, each 10 meters long and three meters wide and lined with mirrors, concentrate sunlight onto two strips of monocrystalline-silicon solar cells suspended above. The parabolic dishes sit on top of mechanical arms that move them to follow the sun. Heat is collected with a mixture of glycol and water that flows through an aluminum pipe behind the solar cells. The glycol solution is fed into a heat exchanger, where it heats up water, and the cooled glycol solution is fed back to the solar arrays.

Similar hybrid solar systems have failed in the past because the solar cells have overheated. Cogenra uses sensors to monitor the temperature of its solar cells and an automated control system to draw fluid away more quickly if they need cooling down.

Overheating impairs the performance of a solar cell and is a big problem for hybrid solar systems, says Tim Merrigan, a senior program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. Merrigan notes that more sophisticated equipment for monitoring the buildup of heat and adjusting the flow of liquid away from the cells can help prevent this, but “it is certainly not an easy thing to do correctly.” With Cogenra’s technology, there is also a trade-off between the amount of heat that can be produced and the efficiency of the solar cells.

The winery installation will serve as an important test bed for Cogenra’s technology and for hybrid solar technology in general. The system will generate data showing how efficiently it can produce electricity and heated water under different weather conditions and how well it can meet the fluctuating needs of the winery’s operation.

The solar arrays will be able to produce 50 kilowatts of electricity, and the equivalent of 222 kilowatts of thermal energy. Gilad Almogy, the CEO of Cogenra, says this will cut the winery’s use of natural gas for water heating by 45 to 50 percent and meet about 10 percent of its electricity needs.

Image Credit: Congera Solar

In the “information age” there is a vast amount of data that is stored and instantly made available upon request. Users of these data range from companies complying with the recent Sarbanes–Oxley accounting data legislation to consumers watching YouTube videos, to the processing and storage capabilities required for climate change modelling. This has led to a vast increase in the number of data centres – buildings that house a collection of servers, storage devices, network equipment, power supplies, fans and other cooling equipment which provide information at our fingertips, supplying business, government, academia and consumers around the world.
In 2002, the global data centre footprint, including equipment use and embodied carbon, was 76 MtCO2e and this is expected to more than triple by 2020 to 259 MtCO2e – making it the fastest-growing contributor to the ICT sector’s carbon footprint, at 7% pa in relative terms (Fig. Below).

Calculating the data centre footprint in 2020

If growth continues in line with demand, the world will be using 122 million servers in 2020,
up from 18 million today. In addition to this 9% pa increase in server numbers, there will be a shift from high-end servers (mainframes) to volume servers,30 the least expensive kind of server that can handle much of the computational needs of businesses. Row A of Fig. Above shows the increase in footprint that would be expected by simply scaling up today’s data centre technology without the application of virtualisation technologies in data centres.

Power consumption differs by server type but, like PCs, no increase in overall consumption is expected in the coming years, in spite of increased processing demand. This is due mainly to new technologies in all types of servers and explains the net zero change in Row B of Fig. Above.
A major trend driving down the overall growth in the footprint of data centres (Row C of Fig. Above) is virtualisation – pooling assets such as computing and storage where utilisation is low, so they can be used across the enterprise and beyond. Virtualisation represents a radical rethinking of how to deliver the services of data centres, pooling resources that are underutilised and could reduce emissions by 27% – equivalent to 111 MtCO2e.
Technologies are also available to detect where within the data centre temperatures are running high and to direct cooling to those areas thus delivering a 12% reduction in cooling costs.
By 2020, the analysis predicted that these measures could achieve an approximate 18% reduction (55 MtCO2e) in consumption.
Only about half of the energy used by data centers powers the servers and storage; the rest is needed to run back-up, uninterruptible power supplies (5%) and cooling systems (45%).34 There are a number of ways to reduce this energy overhead, some of which are expected to be adopted by 2020. The simplest way is to turn down the air conditioning. Similarly, in climates where the outside temperature allows, simply directing external air into the data centre can save cooling costs for much of the year. By allowing the temperature of the data centre to fluctuate along a broader operating temperature range, a 24% reduction in energy consumption from cooling is possible. Distributing low voltage direct current (DC) into the data centre would eliminate the need for mechanical back-up, uninterruptible power supply units.

By 2020, the net footprint for data centers is predicted to be 259 MtCO2e. At this point, volume servers will represent more than 50% of the data center footprint (174 MtCO2e) and cooling systems for data centers alone will amount to 4% of the total ICT footprint (Fig. Below).

Click to download the full Pdf Report from smart2020.org

What is COP16/CMP6?

COP16/CMP6 is the 16th edition of Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP) and the 6th Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP). “Parties” refers to all the national states that signed and ratified both of the international treaties, committing to observe and comply with its terms regarding international cooperation against climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been signed by 194 State Parties and the Kyoto Protocol has been ratify by 184 State Parties . In accordance with Article 7 of the Convention, the Conference of the Parties in its authority of the supreme body has the mandate of adopting the necessary decisions for the promotion of its effective application.

The name COP refers to the English acronyms of the reunions of the State Parties on numerous International Treaties (“Conference of Parties”). However, due to the relevance of the subject within the international agenda, the name COP is related to Climate Change. These conferences are celebrated annually between the months of November and December. This year, the Conference will take place in Cancun, Mexico, yet it is important to highlight that it is the Convention’s Secretariat that organizes them in conformity to the reunions standards established by the United Nations.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is composed of two general categories of participants: The State Parties and the observers. The observers are divided into Intergovernmental Organizations and Nongovernmental Organizations (Article 7 section 6), who must register and accredit themselves before the Convention’s Secretariat in order to participate in the Conferences. Only the representatives of the registered organizations will be allowed to assist attend the sessions of the different bodies of the Convention, as observers.

United Nations Climate Change Conference Official Website

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ScienceDaily (2009-02-26).