Iakov Kalinin, 123RF
Demystified: The facts about green IT
Power Savings
Does it make sense to replace your computers every three years once the warranty has expired? This practice would keep you up to date at all times, and it might be a boon for the environment if you went for the latest, power-saving technology. Or, does it make more sense to rejuvenate your old hardware? This approach would save money and might be more environmentally friendly, because it removes the need to build a new PC and dispose of the old one.
A survey titled "Total Cost of Ownership & Green IT" by the Innsbruck Kompetenzzentrum IT (Innsbruck Competence Center for IT), Kufstein University, and IZES Institut für ZukunftsEnergieSysteme (Institute for Future Energy Systems) GmbH [1] [2] investigated precisely this topic.
The question the researchers set out to answer was: How economical and ecological is replacing or upgrading your complete hardware every three years – taking a total period of nine years into account?
"The economic situation was mainly evaluated with reference to our total cost of ownership calculations," the authors wrote. They calculated the total cost of ownership (TCO) with reference to 11 individual factors, covering all costs that occur in the course of procurement, use, and disposal of the equipment – including the disposal of electronic waste. The calculations also indirectly included costs of installation, maintenance, and failure, as well as risk costs.
According to explanation of the survey, these environmental costs were mainly based on CO2 calculations performed by IZES. The researchers attempted to account for both the CO2 emissions of the various IT devices throughout their service life and for the CO2 that occurs during production and disposal of the equipment (Figure 1).
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