IBMs Six New Green IT Initiatives Target, Energy Efficiency, GHG Reduction

by Chris Preimesberger

IBM has initiated a new global industry alliance called the Green Sigma Coalition to meter, monitor, automate, and analyze smart solutions for energy, water, waste and [GHG] greenhouse gas management in data centers. Currently all this is being done on a local basis. The coalition will enable companies using these solutions to better understand energy and water usage, waste, and GHG emissions across their business operations and infrastructure, and make changes to improve efficiency, reduce consumption and waste, and lower environmental impact. Charter members are Johnson Controls, Honeywell Building Solutions, ABB, Eaton, ESS, Cisco Systems, Siemens Building Technologies Division and Schneider Electric.

IBM is building a first-of-a-kind water-cooled supercomputer that will repurpose excess heat and use it for the offices where the supercomputer is deployed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. The system, called Aquasar, is expected to decrease the carbon footprint of the institute by up to 85 percent—equivalent to 30 tons of CO2 per year, compared to a similar system using conventional fan-cooling methods. It is expected to lower overall energy consumption in the data center by more than one-third.The water-cooled supercomputer will consist of two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack and will have a peak performance of about 10 Teraflops. (Photo Courtesy of IBM)

Big Blue has begun a new long-term research initiative to create next-generation rechargeable batteries capable of storing 10 times more energy than today’s most powerful Lithium-ion batteries. Eventually, this technology could power smarter energy grids, support widespread use of electric cars, and more. Scientists at IBM Research’s Almaden lab in San Jose, California, are undertaking a multi-year research initiative around a new grid-scale, efficient, electrical energy storage network. The team plans to explore rechargeable Lithium/Air systems, which have the greatest energy density of all practical battery systems and are inherently safer than traditional Lithium/ion systems.

San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission is using IBM Maximo Asset Management software to help reduce pollution in the water that surrounds the city on three sides—the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The SFPUC treats an average of 80 million to 90 million gallons of wastewater per day during dry weather and up to 370 million gallons of combined wastewater and storm runoff per day during the rainy season. It is using the software to develop smarter management of the city’s 1,000 miles of sewer system and three treatment facilities.

IBM has completed outfitting its 100th scaleable, modular data center. Located in Columbia County, Georgia, it runs online services for the county’s agencies and citizens. Over the past two years, Columbia County had experienced increasing outages due to inadequate power and cooling systems, illustrating the need to upgrade its existing data center infrastructure. The county’s population has grown 26 percent since 2000, increasing the demand for citizen services that are available 24 hours a day via the Web.

Big Blue has integrated its Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management to work with Cisco Systems’ EnergyWise and Honeywell’s EBI and Tridium energy management software packages. The new combined packages broaden the range of power consumption information and energy optimization policies that can be managed by IBM Energy Management to help organizations discover, optimize, and report energy usage within their data center and business infrastructure.