Towards Carbon Neutral Computing
For many years now software companies have been engaged in the practice of dogfooding, actively using their own products to convey their confidence in them. I was interested to read yesterday that the UK Government is dogfooding its own IT carbon reduction strategies and aiming to become the first government in the world to make its computer systems carbon neutral (Whitehall bid to cut IT emissions). This is indeed a laudable aim, though at this point in time it applies only to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and not the whole of the government but it is an excellent move in the right direction.
Apparently the move to a carbon neutral computing resource is to be achieved through a combination of offsetting, switching off unused computers and ensuring that servers don't remain idle overnight. According to the sources, UK government computer systems account for a whopping 20% of the total government carbon emissions which is probably a far greater proportion than for most other computing users. Turning off idle computers has a significant role to play in this strategy and it is reckoned that this will save 117,500 tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to removing 40,000 cars from the road. Not only is this good for the environment it should also be good for the taxpayer as there will be a similar significant reduction in the government's energy bill.
DEFRA haven't approached us with regard to using our Powerdown energy saving software as part of this strategy. My understanding is that they have invested heavily in new networking hardware to allow them to run a Wake-On-LAN based solution offered by one of our competitors. We think that Powerdown is a much more reliable and cost effective solution as it does not rely on Wake-On-LAN, which can be notoriously flaky, and will even work when computers are disconnected from the network. If the government are interested in using Powerdown we would be more than happy to talk to them.
And yes, Codefounders does eat its own dogfood too. We run the latest production and development builds of Powerdown on all of our client computers, both at home and in the office. We also recently published an article describing some measurements that were taken in the field on a customer's system to show how effective Powerdown can be in saving energy and reducing carbon emissions. Check out the article on our site for the full results and details of how we conducted the measurements.
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