Greening – Part 2
The strategy would be to analyze servers, buildings, energy use, water use, and waste for the entire online effort, the space, the servers and the people in the online group. How did I go about that?
I started by contacting the manager of our corporate responsibility office. I let him know that I had a significant effort, but didn’t outline specifics.
I itemized all of the servers involved in online banking. I got the models, listed the power supplies in each, and documented average operating loads for those power supplies.
I itemized people – developers, project managers, web managers, online security, administrators, and application engineers. I got a fairly comprehensive overview of the business, and I contacted The Green Office to get an estimate of cost. They don’t really have any templates that account for geographically distributed efforts, but I still tried to compute a combination of emission reduction credits and renewable energy credits (green tags) that would neutralize our online banking carbon footprint.
It was important to account for buildings, technology, furniture, janitorial, commuting, electricity, water, and waste.
The aggregate was surprising, and extremely significant. It was also economically difficult to justify in a period of expense management. (expense reduction)
