Isra-Mart srl:e-Government National Awards 2010: For sustainable, ‘green IT’ or ‘carbon-efficient’ services

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In the next in our series of previews of one of the most prestigious events in the public sector calendar – the 2010 e-Government National Awards – we’re surveying, as part of our countdown to next month’s gala finalist evening on 26 January 2011 in London, the next category in the awards, that rewarding excellence in delivering sustainable, ‘green IT’ or ‘carbon-efficient’ services which is defined for the purposes of the awards as ‘ICT and e-Government services that are helping the environment’. This award category is another of those in the 2010 process that are being sponsored by KPMG.
e-Government National Awards 2010: For sustainable, ‘green IT’ or ‘carbon-efficient’ services

We’ve already profiled the e-Learning for Healthcare: e-Safeguarding Children and Young People, commissioned by the Department of Health in the Learning & Skills category; it’s in this one due to its undeniable green credentials, as the system is of course a harbinger of an eventual NHS-wide move to deliver more training electronically which is estimated as possibly savings as much as save £26m and 720 tonnes of CO2 per year when fully up and running.

So let’s quickly pass on to the Land Forces Enhanced Video Telephone Conferencing system from Land Forces, Ministry of Defence. Why is it classed as a green IT project? Well, business travel undertaken by MoD officials generates about 2% of the MoD’s green house gas (GHG) emissions – yes, a comparatively modest proportion compared to carbon emissions from the global MOD estate (31%) and energy and fuel for ships or aircraft and ground vehicles (67%), it is an area where the MoD feels it can effect quick change.

Thus the Ministry aims to reduce emissions from road transport by 15% by 2010/11 (based on a 2005/6 baseline) – and it expects a significant share of this reduction to be achieved through the use of what the organisation’s Change Mitigation Strategy terms “Green Information Communication Technology”. BT has supplied a video-conferencing system which is a key part of that, which is already being heavily used; members of the Land Forces are now attending around 200 multi-site meetings a month with an average of 12 people attend each meeting, most of whom would otherwise have had to travel by car or public transport.

Extrapolating from an analysis of four months’ of recent usage, almost 500,000km of travel will be eliminated over the course of a full year – the equivalent of 280 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide over a full year.

What’s Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University been up to in this field? Well, its thin client rollout has been hailed as delivering lower power consumption results in lower heat generation, thus reducing the need for air-conditioning in areas of high concentrations of desktop computing. As a result, says the Uni, its new building design requires minimal air conditioning and mechanical ventilation delivering direct energy savings of approximately £47,000 per annum compared to use of equivalent numbers of PCs – on top of £1 million in savings on the overall capital cost of the campus.

The university has meanwhile also been gradually increasing the temperature of its data room from it’s initially design of 18C to 25C and will continue to increase this at least to 27C as older equipment is phased out, a move that’s translating to approximately 4% energy savings per degree, as well as other energy saving moves, like more use of virtualisation. The new system was delivered completely in-house by a dedicated team of QMU IT and facilities staff, using Citrix technology.

Not to be outdone, local government is just as interested in the sustainability agenda. Thus we now turn to Hampshire County Council and its data centre, which has already won a few other awards in its own right.

The new structure has a range of green aspects, such as the fact that energy consumption has been halved through highly insulated cladding, natural ventilation and plant, heating and lighting, the fact that during colder conditions waste heat from the data centre is used to pre condition air entering the buildings, reducing the need for conventional heating systems and the way it utilises a number of new technologies including IP KVM switches, Intelligent Power distribution, IIM network elements and BMS integration again to monitor and control all operations remotely and as efficiently as possible.

Overall, Hants is claiming a reduction in electricity consumption of 42% and says heat recycling took energy saving to 64% through the coldest months and that it confidently expects to achieve reductions in CO2 emissions of over 700, 00 kg each year going forward. The Council worked with specialist data centre operator Mace on the design, procurement and project management of the facility’s design, build and migration.

Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (www.cornwallpartnershiptrust.nhs.uk) is in the 2010 category of green IT with and its e-enabled innovative shared learning initiative. The body is a mental health and Learning Disabilities Trust with an Organisational Development and Learning team in place to support not only CFT but also the wider health care community across the county – and as we all know, that’s a big area!

Indeed, in recognition of the vast area of Cornwall the team says a priority is to work together to reduce its carbon footprint, one of the fruits of which is this learning management system to support our learners through e-enabled technologies. Green benefits include a huge reduction in travelling back and forth across the county: ‘In the last year, our e-enabled learning has reduced mileage travelled to attend face to face learning by approximately 709,600 miles – this equates to us working with our learners to reduce our CO2 emissions by 193.05 tonnes,’ it says. In concrete terms, to offset the miles saved would have meant the planting of no less than 194 trees.

Back to local government for the last two finalists in this important category of the 2010 process.

Can an ICT strategy help reduce the carbon footprint? Southend Borough Council says, yes of course. Specifically, its 2010-13 plans, which include a big commitment to virtualisation via VMware technology and things like printer rationalisation, have resulted in a reduction in its carbon footprint by over 600 tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s not all; at zero cost to residents, all equipment is disposed to ensure that no landfill is used but rather the equipment where possible it re-deployed after undergoing data cleansing and equipment that is unusable for reuse, is broken down into its component parts for recycling.

Finally, we go west, young man, to Green Digital Bristol, a project by Bristol City Council, which has a stated aim of aspiring to be a world class leading city for green and digital matters.

Working with the Carbon Trust, it was soon found out that business use of ICT was responsible for 67,258 tonnes of CO2 per year, no less than 3% of the city’s total emissions and accounted for 7% of industrial and commercial emissions – or 125 million Kwh, costing £11m simply to run, without taking into account equipment costs Bristol’s ICT team is taking this very seriously, committing to developing a suite of resources and practical projects which will help the whole City unite to use technology to reduce its carbon footprint and to in parallel reduce the carbon footprint of Council technology.

This has a number of facets, ranging from, among other things, developing a methodology for measuring the City’s ICT related carbon footprint, measuring the impact of business use of ICT on the City’s carbon emissions and seeking to create best practice resources for the Council and its partners. The work is very much ongoing and is now involving a range of outreach initiatives to engage residents too.

You will surely agree that such commitment is in very suitable company with all these notable projects around green, sustainable and carbon-reduced ICT in the public sector.