This week we are announcing that the Green Grid (TGG) and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) are joining forces under the Green Grid’s brand. As the President and co-chair of CSCI throughout its life, I’m very excited about what this means for our ability to achieve the goal to reduce the energy footprint of computing and the benefits for our members. But it’s also a good time for reflection.When CSCI was founded in 2007, we deliberately created a board of directors that wouldn’t always agree with each other. And looking back, I’m a little awestruck by the leading lights of sustainability in our industry and the NGO community who contributed to the organization. For most of the life of the organization, my co-chair was Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar. It was a privilege to work closely with him on the strategy & goals for the organization. Bill’s now at Facebook and over the five years of CSCI’s effort, we saw great contributions from those who came and went from CA, Dell, EDS, Emerson, F5, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, NRDC, WWF, and more recently Cisco, Juniper and Samsung. Very different organizations, but ALL individuals committed to a common agenda.
We established CSCI with the audacious goal of reducing the emissions from computing by 54M tons/year as measured in mid-2011. Our focus was on improving the efficiency of power delivery – mostly through improvements in power supplies – and driving the use of power management. We were happy to partner with many other organizations with aligned goals: 80+, Energy Star, Japan’s Top Runner Program, the Green Grid for example. To support this goal, manufacturers committed to aggressive roadmaps and nearly 700 companies pledged to buy more efficient systems and deploy power management on their PC fleets. And 9000 individuals also made similar pledges. Our latest audit shows that this very collaborative effort hasn’t quite hit 54M tons, but did get to the 40-44M ton range.
CSCI also expanded its charter to include networking equipment with great contributions from Broadcom, Cisco and Juniper and that work plus our original efforts on PC/server power supplies and power management will now roll into the Green Grid’s Technical Committee. All of our members are invited to join TGG and the pledge we’ve had for IT buyers now becomes the foundation for TGG’s Sustainable Computing Initiative.
So the great work of CSCI continues – now as part of a larger, broader organization with more combined resources. Giving up my President title is very worthwhile!