Fellow biz reporter Sheryl Jean has an article up today on the growing number of “chief green officers” at major companies, including some in the Dallas area.
Dale Hoenshell, global environmental sustainability manager for Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., wasn’t quoted in the story, but I was recently out at the EDS headquarters to talk to Dale and a handful of “futurists” about the future of energy, and it made for a fascinating discussion.
First off, Dale walked me through some of the changes EDS is making internally, primarily in switching out its old, inefficient fluorescent lights for new tubes that require much less juice but are still plenty bright — and will eventually save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The lights are also hooked up to the corporate network, so workers can log on to their computers to precisely adjust the amount of light being beamed onto their desks.
Pretty cool.
To find out how technology is being used to solve the energy crisis beyond just EDS, though, I sat down with three tech experts from EDS, EMC and Cisco to talk about how much of an impact tech products have on energy consumption and what the tech industry can do to solve the problem.
There was on overwhelming consensus between the three gurus — Rob Aldrich (Cisco’s director of data center solutions), Jeff Wacker (EDS futurist), and Dick Sullivan (director of storage product marketing for EMC) — that the current runup in oil and gasoline prices is a permanent shift.
“In the 70s it was contrived,” Wacker said. “Now it’s fundamental.”
And tech, right now, is as much a part of the problem as part of the solution.
Mr. Aldrich said that the average desktop PC, if left turned on 24 hours a day for one year, burns through the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of coal.
Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Wacker and Mr. Aldrich all called for a “Manhattan Project for energy,” using a variety of technologies to deal with the shrinking supply of oil and growing demand for energy.
Conservation also has to be a part of the future, they said, including conserving energy use in tech products.
Conservation doesn’t have to be painful for gadget fans, though, and can include something as simple as hooking all your gadgets up to surge protectors and turning off the power switch on the protector when you go to bed, leave for work or take a vacation.
That’s because even when most gadgets are turned off individually, they still draw some power to respond to remote controls, display the time, etc. But the surge protector switch actually cuts off the power completely.
Regardless of your political position on global warming and whether the surge in oil prices is artificial or not, cutting your energy usage will, if nothing else, save you money.
And it’s hard to argue with that.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Entries (RSS)