What will you be doing March 29 at 8.30pm? Having a drink with friends? Having dinner? Spending time with your family? Instead of sitting with the lights on, why not spend an hour by candlelight and support WWF’s worldwide event Earth Hour.

Starting in 2007, Earth Hour asks individuals, businesses and governments to switch out their lights for one hour – at 8.30pm local time, whatever your location around the globe. The idea is to allow those who take part to show they are taking steps to reduce their environmental impact, and for many people it is the first step to making more significant, sustainable changes to their lifestyle.

Last year 157 countries took part, with over 10 million people in the UK alone turning off their lights at 8.30pm [1]. This year organisers WWF hope even more people to join in, with “Amazing Spider Man 2” actors Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone each pledging their support to one of the Earth Hour Blue crowdfunding projects [2].

While not every light should be turned off, for example safety lights, traffic lights etc. [3], you can choose to turn off overhead room lights, lamps, computers and other electronic devices such as televisions, and other similar light sources.

An event like Earth Hour raises awareness all over the globe about the importance of conserving energy and becoming a more sustainable society. Making the focus lighting is highly relevant to this, as typically 7% of a household’s energy bill comes from lighting [4].

There are some easy and quick ways to instantly reduce your lighting costs:

• Use natural daylight – when it’s light outside keen curtains and blinds open to let in sunlight, rather than having lamps on.
• Turn off lights when you leave the room – having lights on in empty rooms keeps your bills higher than they need to be.
• Use sensors and timers so lights go off automatically when they aren’t needed.
• Make sure the bulbs you buy are energy efficient – Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are both readily available across the country.
• Shop for Energy Efficient lights at https://www.energysavingwarehouse.co.uk/store/Lights

References

[1] WWF. Earth Hour in 2013. 2014. https://earthhour.wwf.org.uk/about-wwfs-earth-hour/earth-hour-in-2013

[2] Earth Hour. Earth Hour & Spider-Man Join Forces to Save the Planet. 2014. http://www.earthhour.org/be-superhero-planet

[3] Earth Hour. Celebrating Earth Hour. 2014. http://www.earthhour.org/celebrating-earth-hour

[4] Energy Saving Trust. Lighting. 2014. http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/Electricity/Lighting

With energy bills on the rise, and temperatures dropping, winter can be an expensive time of the year. It can be tricky to balance not spending too much with making sure your residence is warm enough to be comfortable. Below are several ways to cut down on energy use, from bigger projects such as insulating lofts and walls, to making sure your radiators aren’t having to work double to keep your house warm.

Insulation

• Insulation can make a huge difference in both keeping your house warm and keeping your bills down. 25% of heat is lost through lack of proper roof and loft insulation [1], so insulating these areas can make a huge difference to the warmth of your house. Insulation can save families between £45 and £110 a year [2].
• Wall and floor insulation can also help to save energy and money. Depending on when the property was built, solid or cavity wall insulation can be installed – external walls on houses built before 1920 are likely to be solid walls, which allow more heat to pass through than cavity walls, which are usually found in properties built after 1920.

Windows

• Energy-efficient glazing can help to reduce the amount of heat lost through windows during the cold winter months. Double glazing works by having two panes of glass with a gap between them, usually 16mm, which stops heat from escaping. Triple glazed windows have an extra pane of glass.
• By upgrading from single to double glazing windows you could save between £40 and £175 a year, depending on property size, and the energy rating of the windows [3].

Heating systems

• Have a look at the condition of your heating system – is it performing as it should? Does it need fixing or parts replaced to make sure it’s working as best it can? Newer more efficient models require an initial upfront cost, but save both energy and money over time.
• Set timers so that heat is produced only when you need it, rather than being on all day.

Radiators

• Don’t heat empty rooms! Make sure radiators are turned down in rooms used less often – this reduces your energy use and bills.
• Make sure not to cover your radiators. This stops heat spreading to the rest of the room, and also makes the radiators work harder.

Curtains

• Keep curtains open during the day to let sunlight in and close at dusk to stop heating escaping. Make sure only windows are covered, and not radiators.

Extra Layers

• Before central heating existed the best way (and still one of the best ways) to stay warm was to cover yourself with extra layers – blankets, jumpers and thick socks can help you to stay warmer during the cold winter months without having to turn up the heating!

References

[1] National Insulation Association. Insulation: The Facts and Figures. 2011. http://www.nia-uk.org/media-and-information/uploads%5Cnews%5Cid146%5C20110404_Insulation_Facts_and_Figures_final.pdf

[2] National Insulation Association. Loft Insulation. 2014. http://www.nia-uk.org/householder/index.php?page=loft-insulation

[3] Energy saving trust. Windows. 2014. http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/Insulation/Windows

The increasing demand for storage, networking and computation has driven intensification of large complex data centers that run many of today’s Internet, financial, commercial and business applications. Data a centers consume large amounts of electricity, they comprises of many thousands of servers and can use as much energy as small city. The demand for more information and superior analyses of data, along with a gradually rising need to store information, is causing the growth in the number and size of data centers. This growth in turn comes with an augment in the amount of energy consumed, including energy necessary to both power and cool the data centres computer equipment and facility system respectively.

The main problem in data centres is that a significant portion of the energy used is not going to the computers, but to power to the facility and cool the data centre. Data center energy usage can generally be divided into two mainly groups, IT systems (hardware and software) and the required supporting infrastructure (power and cooling systems) of the data center facility itself. Typical data centre energy consumption is attributed by 52% to equipment IT load such as processor, sever power supply , communication equipment and storage, and by 48% to facilities such as HVAC and lighting facilities, which in turn account for 54% of energy total consumption in buildings.
Direct electricity used by information technology (IT) equipment, cooling and power distribution in data centers represented about 1% of total world electricity consumption by 2005. In addition, this sector also is responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions approximately the same as the airline industry. Data centres are becoming “electricity guzzlers”, where the server farms alone contribute 200 million tons of CO2 of the total CO2 emissions globally. According to the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL), data centers rank among the most energy-intensive types of Facilities (HVAC and lighting), using as much as 100 times the energy per square foot of a typical building. From 2005 to 2010, server consumption across the world data centres required additional capacity equal to more than 10 additional 1,000 MW power plants. Based on current trends, energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12% per year, due to the growing demand from new services and users, resulting in an increase in GHG emissions. Electricity consumption (as a whole) in Western Europe is estimated to increase from a level of 56 terawatt hours (TWh) per year in 2007 to 104 (TWh) per year by 2020, with data centre power consumption playing a major part in this increase.
Based on current and foreseeable trends, the basic price of energy will continue to rise over time, and may become constrained as global demands rise, making energy use and efficiency a long term business priority. Moreover, Carbon footprint and greenhouse gases are also becoming subject to governmental regulations and taxes. According to The Green Grid report, there are now 28 types of energy policies affecting data centers in 12 EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) countries. Therefore, the rapidly increasing electricity demand for data center operation has motivated efforts to have a better understanding of current data center energy use as well as to identify strategies that reduce the environmental impact of these buildings.

In today’s world, it is almost impossible to discuss any business operation without considering efficiency. The goal for every data center owner or operator is to increase the energy efficiency without impacting on reliability. According to Uptime institute survey over 1,100 data centers around the world in 2012, data centre companies are looking for different energy efficiency strategies related with new cooling solutions that meet the demands of the hardware and the room, while optimizing energy efficiency. Environmental protection agency (EPA) has explored three energy-efficiency scenarios: improved operation, best practices and state-of-the-art, in order to develop a better understanding of energy efficiency, thus, illustrating a significant potential for efficient technologies and practices to improve the energy efficiency of IT equipment and site infrastructure. If state-of-the-art technologies were adopted in data centres, energy efficiency could be improved by as much as 55 % compared to current efficiency trends, representing the maximum technical potential.
Data centre companies are taken different steps in order to go green and to be a more sustainable sector. They notice greater opportunities in data centre cooling, power management and consolidation of servers, followed by facilities management and implementation of standards in order to reduce the energy consumption. Efforts trying to reduce the power consumption have been seen in data centre companies in recent years in order to improve their energy performance. For instance, some companies are implementing more efficient cooling systems and reducing the required power equipment by implementing virtualization and more green IT operations related with servers, memory and networks. In addition, they are implementing power saving strategies such as hot/cold aisle containment, free cooling techniques and CFD (computational fluids dynamics) models, airflow management of temperatures, air side economizer, more efficient processors including 45-nanometer silicon and quad-core processors, and chip cooling technology in order to reduce the energy requirements in data centres.
Consequently, it can be seen that making the operation of data centers “greener” has become the main focus of many research activities recently, looking for an appropriate and more efficient energy management in their operations. Efforts has been made by data centre companies in order to reduce the power in data centres and improve their energy performance, through the implementation of different innovations in the software and hardware, as well as newer installations for cooling data centres. However, data centers have been catalogued as a crucial environmental issue which deserves closer attention, hence, this data centre industry need to be studied in more detail and much deeper.