Green IT or Green Software Design?
The term GREEN IT has been around for a long time. Does anyone still remember the once important CeBIT trade fair? In 2009, there was a separate “Green IT World” there because the term was rapidly becoming a hype at the time. Since then, a lot has happened in Green IT. Power-saving processors emerged and data centres improved their “Power Usage Efficiency” (PUE) with more efficient cooling systems. Today, some data centres (RZ) are built specifically in Scandinavia because cold seawater provides a natural coolant. But there is still a lot to do: The PUE of the existing data centres varies considerably – there is still a lot of room for improvement. When selecting a cloud provider, it is therefore essential to also consider its PUE.
The efforts in the area of (cloud) data centres have paid off. The efficiency of German data centres, i.e. computing power per energy input, increased by a factor of 8 between 2010 and 2020. (Information from the Borderstep Institute, seehere.) If there were such efficiency improvements in all sectors, Germany would already be almost carbon-neutral today.
Unfortunately, this progress is more than swallowed up by the ever-increasing thirst for computing power. As a result, the total energy demand of German data centres rose by almost 60% in the same period (from a good 10 to 16 billion kwh/year, see: Dr. Ralph Hintemann, “Energiebedarf der Rechenzentren steigt trotz Corona weiter an“) (= Energy demand of data centres continues to rise despite the coronavirus pandemic). Therefore, the situation is certainly not improving. On the contrary, IT needs more electricity year on year. And the forecasts are clear: If nothing is done, the thirst for energy will continue to grow relentlessly in the coming years.
To really get a handle on the climate-damaging side of digitalisation, we therefore need an additional starting point. This is where GREEN SOFTWARE DESIGN comes into play. While previous efforts have concentrated almost exclusively on the hardware side, GREEN SOFTWARE DESIGN starts with the software. Because the hardware only has to do what the software demands. The more efficiently the software uses hardware resources, the slower the demand for computing power grows.
It is astonishing that the potential of sustainable software development was almost not used at all in practice until 2021. The only exceptions are apps (because users don’t like it when apps drain their battery) and web design (because efficiency also contributes decisively to speed). Anything else though? Nothing. Although there are a number of publications in the academic field, none of these had reached the real world by 2020. (At least nothing that can be seen).
Why not try to plan your next software development project with the aim of actively managing carbon efficiency in order to keep the software’s carbon footprint small? The developers will have lots of questions at first. They do not know at all how they are supposed to manage this task.
GREEN SOFTWARE DESIGN is now only starting to get the attention it has long deserved. And so Microsoft, for example, recently founded the Green Software Foundation. And Syngenio started the GREEN SOFTWARE DESIGN initiative, which is the first and most important contact point for this in Germany. Syngenio itself works on methods for integrating climate efficiency into development processes and analyses products and frameworks with regard to their suitability for GREEN SOFTWARE DESIGN. You can make use of this experience. And soon participate in the Green Software Design Community yourself. Because we can only move forward fast enough when we come together.