Power & Energy

Consumer electronics giants Apple, Dell, Motorola, Microsoft, Nintendo and Samsung have been slow to get serious about climate change, and are notably lagging behind, according to the latest edition of the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics.

The environmental computing proponent group Computers Off Australia have developed a funding solution for the Government's Digital Education Revolution.

Engineers at Panasonic have succeeded in reducing the size of a prototype methanol fuel cell so that its no larger than a laptop battery pack but provides all-day power.

Ericsson has equipped its environmentally friendly radio base station site concept Tower Tube with built-in support for wind power, in a bid to help operators go green and expand mobile networks to where electricity isn't available, it announced on Thursday.

Mobile computing devices that need charging once a day would need it just once a month with a new type of chip that uses a thirtieth of the power of conventional chips and is seven times faster by virtue of underlying logic that embraces error in its calculations.

Toshiba showed off a prototype of its fast-charging SCiB battery designed for laptops on Tuesday, but said the technology is still a ways off from making its way into computers.

Business requirements, not corporate social responsibility goals, are driving Green IT developments in the U.K. according to new research.

Toshiba is close to launching its first commercial direct-methanol fuel-cell device, which promises a faster way to recharge portable electronics products.

Google's Eric Schmidt calls for new government spending to improve broadband and encourage alternative energies.

Businesses last year spent approximately US$1.3 billion to make sure that spinning hard disk drives did not overheat and kept running despite being squeezed to near-capacity limits, according to IDC.

If you're pining over how to go green and reduce your organization's energy consumption, consider how IT can be used to reduce power inside and out of the company walls, according to a South Australia government department CIO.

CIOs and senior IT executives lack the "green" to go green even though they overwhelmingly believe that a more energy efficient data center will become mission-critical, according to a recent survey.

Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit a saturation point and beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about data center power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.

I find it ironic that Seagate chose Earth Day to celebrate the shipment of its billionth disk drive. After all, increased drive dependency in the datacenter is fast transforming into an unsustainable energy demand.

Spurred by business needs as well as environmental concerns, green IT projects blossomed in datacenters and on desktops throughout the world in 2007.

Some enterprises have found ways to ensure their technology investments provide both environmental benefit and a quick return on investment.

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that no more than 10% of all PCs in use by organizations have power management enabled, and as a result are wasting large amounts of electricity and contributing to greenhouse gases. One major culprit may be Windows XP.