Green IT

VENICE, La.--President Barack Obama will visit the Gulf Coast this weekend to back efforts to avert a environmental disaster threatened by a huge, growing oil slick forecasters said was being driven ashore by winds.

The visit, which White House officials said on Saturday would be within the next 48 hours, signaled Obama was anxious to be seen to be paying close attention to the cleanup and containment of one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history.

Swelled by oil gushing unchecked from a ruptured deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, the 130-mile by 70-mile … Read more

Despite Google's lobbying on clean-energy policy and investments in renewable energy, it was Cisco and Ericsson who received Greenpeace's top marks in its ranking of computing vendors' activity on climate change.

The environmental watchdog group released its annual Cool IT Leaderboard on Thursday, which judges large IT and consumer electronics companies on a range of criteria related to climate change, including efforts to lower their environmental footprints and commercial efforts in energy and efficiency.

This year, Greenpeace placed Cisco at the top of the list because of its move into building energy management and the smart grid, technologies … Read more

PC energy management company Verdiem said on Tuesday it has signed a deal with Cisco to create software for managing PCs and networking equipment from Cisco.

Under an original equipment manufacturing arrangement, Verdiem's energy-management software will be sold as Cisco's EnergyWise Orchestrator and be able to track and report electricity usage from IP phones, wireless access points, edge switches, and other devices that run over the Power over Ethernet protocol.

Verdiem's software gives IT managers a centralized way to set power policies for networked PCs, such as putting PCs on standby after a certain amount of time … Read more

Electronics and wireless equipment maker Belkin is getting deeper into energy management as it acquires a small company with technology that detects how electricity is used within a home.

The company, called Zensi, was founded by academics--including Shwetak Patel and Matthew Reynolds--who developed a system for sensing the amount of electricity used by various appliances, said Kevin Ashton, the former CEO of Zensi.

By interpreting electrical variations on a building's wiring, the system can detect when different appliances are turned on and off and can create a profile on electricity consumption. One device plugged into the wall could, … Read more

Amid the talk of APIs and mapping the social graph, Twitter engineers are also thinking about energy.

During the Chirp Twitter developer conference last week, there was a brief presentation on how much energy is consumed by tweeting (hat tip to Earth2Tech for uncovering).

In the presentation (video starts around 3:05), Raffi Krikorian from Twitter's API team says that running Twitter translates into about 50 million grams of carbon dioxide per day, or one metric ton.

For comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates that a typical passenger car emits about 5.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in a year. … Read more

Researchers say they've taken underwater robotics to the next level, successfully running an autonomous robotic vehicle off the Hawaiian Islands for more than three months, powered only by energy harnessed from changes in sea temperatures.

The Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging vehicle (or Solo-Trec, for short) is the product of a years-long joint research project by NASA, the U.S. Navy, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the University of California at San Diego. The group said Monday that Solo-Trec is the first such vehicle to be powered entirely by the ocean's thermal energy.

Solo-Trec works by … Read more

The "cloud" of data that is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal, Greenpeace said in a new report to be released Tuesday.

A Facebook facility being built in Oregon will rely on a utility whose main fuel is coal, while Apple is building a data warehouse in a North Carolina region that relies mostly on coal, the environmental organization said in the study.

"The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where … Read more

IT pros looking to make their workplaces greener might want to check out a new CompTIA exam.

CompTIA, or the Computer Technology Industry Association, is now offering a Green IT exam to certify IT professionals in the use of environmentally-friendly technologies and policies. CompTIA is a nonprofit trade group that offers certification, research, and other services to IT professionals. The new exam is geared toward IT supervisors, data center managers, and other IT admins who need to ensure that their operations and resources are green, said CompTIA.

More specifically, the exam covers key environmental topics such as waste disposal, preserving … Read more

Cisco is continuing its interest in smart-grid infrastructure and management with an equity investment in GridNet, the smart grid start-up announced Thursday.

The sum of Cisco's investment in GridNet was not disclosed, but the start-up now has another feather in its cap in terms of big-name investors. In addition to the Cisco investment, GridNet's investors now also include GE Energy Financial Services and Intel Capital, as well as several other venture capital firms.

GridNet, which has offices in San Francisco and Sydney, has an array of smart-grid products including two software platforms. One is a smart meter integration … Read more