Triplesourced
Reporting, musing and not to mention some random scribbling on tech issues from green/sustainable IT to security. (http://adonoghue.wordpress.com/)
Wednesday 25 June 2008, 5:25 PM
Dell trumpets green moves, Greenpeace begs to differ
Dell claims the new 80 PLUS Gold power supply certification meets July 2009 Climate Savers targets for servers more than a year ahead of schedule, which require 92 percent minimum efficiency for the power supply unit at 50 percent of rated output.
Interestingly, poking around on the 80 Plus website, we learn that the certification organisation is backed by utility companies. "Participating utilities and energy efficiency organizations across North America have contributed over $5 million of incentives to help the computer industry transition to 80 PLUS certified power supplies."
While it's not clear whether Dell received any of these "incentives", I don't really understand why any computer maker would need funding from a utility company to improve its power efficiency? Surely they can afford to do this for themselves.
(Also Dell just happens to be on the board of one of the main partners of 80 Plus, an organisation called The Climate Savers Computing Initiative.)
While it's good to see a company like Dell, making efforts around servers, we shouldn't forget the scale of the contribution that IT makes to climate change. As Greenpeace points out, the IT sector currently accounts for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, equal to the aviation industry with the average datacentre using the same amount of power as a small village.
And while Dell might be busy giving itself a slap on the back, environmental charity Greenpeace isn't quite as convinced. The green campaigner has just released the latest update to its Greener Electronics Guide in which it names and shames the tech companies it reckons aren't a green as they might be.
The charity is now including criteria to assess the impact of electronics companies on climate change in its latest report.
According to Greenpeace, "Companies are scored on disclosure of their greenhouse gas emissions, commitment for absolute cuts in their own emissions and support for the mandatory global emissions reductions that are needed to tackle climate change."
Although Dell is doing fairly compared to other PC makers it scores 4.5/10 in the latest report, and is in 5th place overall - Greenpeace does single out the PC maker for criticism. "Some companies that promote their green policies come up short when measured against global standards of measuring impacts on climate change. Dell scores relatively poorly while Toshiba, Samsung and LGE score close to, or zero, on climate change criteria," the report claims.
Greenpeace also claims Dell could do better when it comes to potentially harmful or polluting chemicals in its manufacturing process as it has to put out on the market products free of PVC or BFRs.
PreviousComments on this post
Enjoyed reading your post, but respectfully I don't think it captures the data-driven process of 80 PLUS, Climate Savers or our new power supplies.
80 PLUS and Climate Savers are two of the best yardsticks for measuring and comparing power supply efficiency; the requirements are the same for every company and any company not striving for 80 PLUS Silver or Gold is failing to live up to customer expectations. The 80 PLUS Gold power supply we announced yesterday is 92 percent efficient at 50 percent of rated output (the data sheet is available at 80PLUS.org). Our 80 PLUS Silver power supplies are up to 8 percent more efficient than what is required to meet Energy Star 4.0, up to 3 percent more efficient than the Energy Star 5.0 draft and meet the July 2009 Climate Savers requirements a year early.
Protecting the environment is far too important for one company to be leading alone. And customers are looking for tangible results, not empty or ambiguous promises. The hard work with industry yardsticks and common suppliers will only improve the environment and to that end we challenge our competitors to follow our lead.
Hey Sean
Thanks for your mail. Sorry to hear that you don't feel my blog post was representative of Dell's environmental efforts.
However, as I am sure you can realise, my role as journalist is to present all the information that is available to me and to question that information when I see fit.
That means when Dell announces it has reached a milestone, I feel I should report that to our readers which I did. And when Greenpeace announce a new study, I feel I should also report that to our readers, which I did.
I think that Dell has obviously made some progress in this area and some of it is probably genuinely motivated by altruism and concern for the environment.
However, we also live in the real world where Dell has to invest time in not only proactive marketing to convince those consumers and businesses that have environmental concerns that it can deliver products in line with their needs, but also to anticipate, and lobby-against, if necessary, any environmental legislation that could impact its share-holder value.
While an organisation such as Climate Savers may have laudable aims, it's also known for marketing and public relations organisations to create industry bodies around issues that they wish to influence and get their messaging across on. I am not saying that Climate Savers fits into this mould one of the founders I see from the CSCI bylaws doc on the site is the WWF and erm Microsoft - but I think it's good practice to question the motivation of any organisation.
(And that goes for Greenpeace too, who obviously have a vested interest in environmental issues staying front and centre in people's minds and a good way to achieve this is to criticise corporations.)
As for 80 PLUS, I would be interested in your take on the question I raised in my blog on how the $5m of incentives, from utility companies to the computer industry, is dished out and whether this means that organisations such as Dell have been recipients, and if so why?
Also improving the efficiency of power supplies is one step but I haven't seen much real evidence of PC makers really innovating around green technology.
Where for instance is Dell's thin client strategy, giving consumers the choice of using cut-down machines that use much less energy and don't have to be upgraded as often. And while we are on that issue, we'd really like to see Dell make it easier, and cost efficient, for individual components to be upgraded on their machines hard-drives, motherboards etc so that whole machines do not need to be junked when one component fails.
Thanks again for taking time to become part of our community and look forward to your reply.
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