On January 11, 2010, a consortium of some fairly impressive organizations was formed with a singular goal: reduce by a factor of 1000, the 300 million tons of CO2 emitted by the “global network”. As you will see in the YouTube video below, this represents an amount equivalent to 20% of all vehicles registered in the US.
The following organizations have come together (so far):
- AT&T
- Bell Labs
- China Mobile
- CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics
- Freescale Semiconductor
- Foundation for Mobile Communications
- IMEC
- The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE)
- Portugal Telecom
- Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT)
- Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab (WSL)
- Swisscom
- Telefonica
- University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES)
From the GreenTouch.org website:
Global Vision
Green Touch is a consortium of leading Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, academic and non-governmental research experts dedicated to fundamentally transforming communications and data networks, including the Internet, and significantly reducing the carbon footprint of ICT devices, platforms and networks.
Global Mission
By 2015, our goal is to deliver the architecture, specifications and roadmap — and demonstrate key components — needed to reduce energy consumption per user by a factor of 1000 from current levels.
Green Touch members and the global community will benefit from:
- Dramatic reductions in energy consumption, carbon footprint and operating cost
- Nothing less than the reinvention of today’s communications networks
- Unprecedented collaboration between leading experts from around the world
- Application of fundamental research in exciting new areas
- Opportunities to bring innovative new ideas, products and solutions to market
Click on the screenshot to the left to see a brief press conference announcing the effort. The GreenTouch site provides the details and mission of the consortium. What we like about this is that it is a focused effort by a diverse set of industrial and academic organizations in an industry. Here you have Stanford and MIT working together. You have telephone operators who compete with each other working together. It’s a good model. We hope to see this type of consortium and focused/shared learning taking place in other industries as well.
In fact, here’s another view on GreenTouch by Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne:
So. What industry are you in? Do you know what percentage of the contribution to CO2 emissions (and other GHGs) they produce? Is there a similar consortium? Once again, this is where we here at EarthPM firmly believe that project managers (1) can be change agents to help initiate these efforts, and (2) will benefit, in terms of new and exciting projects as these types of efforts are launched.
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