Sustainable IT Holds Opportunities For The UK

Some of these ideas may come from unexpected places: “The way they build server farms in Africa may have lessons for us all,” he says. “The way they factor in renewable energy, and running costs will be different, and we can learn from it.”

With interest growing in the field, both in the US and elsewhere, the UK can now capitalise on the global move towards sustainable IT, contributing to work on standards in the field, and lead in moves to develop businesses in the area, he says.

Instrumenting the office

Some of those moves might come from blue-sky research in places like Cambridge. Hopper’s colleague Andy Rice, for instance, is working on Open Office Mapping, inspired by the OpenStreetMap project, a public geography Wiki movement. “They are doing the same thing indoors,” says Hopper. “It’s a social networking thing. They’ve come up with software where you can put in the furniture around you.”

This could create an actual database of IT and electronic equipment, which would link up with national information on the actual energy going into given buildings, to give details of where that energy is going. “Imagine if that went global,” he says. “We’d have something really useful, and it would have come from nowhere.”

The database might not always turn up information companies are comfortable with, says Hopper: “Most of our computers, I’m embarassed to say, stay on all the time. But audience participation is important. Things like this work better by pull than push – if you tell people to do this, they might object.”

Users could be encouraged to spot green savings in this way, perhaps by some sort of financial reward, or a company league table, Hopper suggests. Rice’s work is at a very early stage, says Hopper: “But I’m very full of beans about it.”

Tags and personal energy meters

Hopper has a company called Ubisense, which is commericalising “active badges” which were developed in Cambridge research labs, and can be used to track people and valuable items within a company: “People are buying this stuff because they can take cost out of some operation,” he says, “and this cost can be mapped onto energy in many cases.” Already that is used in warehouses to find things more efficiently, but in future it could make deliveries better.

Another promising line is a Personal Energy Meter being developed by a PhD student, Simon Hay: “It would be nice if we all had a personal energy meter,” says Hopper. “This should tell you everything, not just the obvious uses of energy you are making, but the indirect uses you are making.” It would apportion the energy and manufacturing costs of your furniture, and your share of public transport, as well as your share of the energy in national assets. It would also work – as far as possible – automatically.

This idea is in its early days, and like many other things it could be useful even if it is only partially delivered, says Hopper: “If we get a reasonable idea of how to achieve some of it, then happiness.”

But is it time to ground Hopper?

“We are changing the way we live our lives because of technology,” says Hopper. But, we ask him, what about one of the best known aspects of his own lifestyle? A keen pilot, he has logged more than 5000 solo flying hours, including a round-the-world flight in his Cessna light aircraft, and has a landing strip behind his large Cambridge house.

Will he have to change this aspect of his life? “That’s a personal issue for me,” he says, somewhat wistfully.