[LINK] Canberra Carbon Cops Certified

[Tom Worthington]

The Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner handed the Australian Crime
Commission their three Green IT certifications from Computers Off  this
morning at the ACC headquarters in Canberra. The ACC are the first
organisation to receive all three certifications:
<http://computersoff.org/display.asp?id=106>.

ACC also have a green headquarters building, but unfortunately few
people will see the inside of it, due to security. The building uses
chilled beam technology, rainwater harvesting and sensor lighting. The
greening is subtle, but if you look up, you notice that what looks like
a solid white ceiling is in fact a mesh designed to let cooling air
circulate from the chilled beam above.

To achieve low energy IT certification, the ACC set its desktop
computers to switch to low power mode, rationalized it servers down to
about half the previous number and purchased carbon offsets for the
remaining power use. They estimate savings at 435 tones of CO2 equivalent
per year and $80,000 on electricity.

The minister said the government was under pressure to practice what
they preach on greenhouse gas emission reduction. He said that it was
easy to loose sight of the fact that not just old smoke stack technology
causes pollution, but hi-tech computers do as well. He commented on the
dilemma in the relationship between central coordination agencies such
as Finance and the other departments, such as ACC. The job of ACC is to
fight crime, not climate change. The Rudd government is crafting a
hybrid arrangement to allow initiatives such as the rationalisation of
data centers but allow individual agencies to use their initiative. He
then handed the three certificates to the ACC.

I hope to be able to use the ACC as a case study for my Green IT
students next semester.

The minister's media release and speech should be on the Minister's web
site shortly.

PS: I couldn't blog this live from the ACC as their security system
blocked my wireless access.
More in my blog at: :
http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/10/canberra-carbon-cops-certified.html


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274