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Green ICT Series
Green on the outside, green on the inside
July 02, 2009
Today, a green coat of paint on the ICT landscape can improve the reputation and value of a company tremendously. This goes for service providers and customers alike. How green is T-Systems? Dr. Ralf Bündgen, representative for environmental protection and sustainability, gave us some insight.
Dr. Bündgen, how important is green ICT at T-Systems?
For us, it's a given. Deutsche Telekom set its first climate protection goals around 15 years ago. Within the scope of our cross-company corporate responsibility strategy, we are making an effort to reduce CO2 emissions at all business units. Since the beginning of 2008, the Group has been meeting its energy needs in Germany entirely with renewable energy sources via RECS, the Renewable Energy Certificate System. Green IT is also a powerful tool when it comes to achieving our environmental and climate protection goals. T-Systems' green services protect the environment by helping companies use energy and resources such as hardware, paper and travel more efficiently.
For us, it's a given. Deutsche Telekom set its first climate protection goals around 15 years ago. Within the scope of our cross-company corporate responsibility strategy, we are making an effort to reduce CO2 emissions at all business units. Since the beginning of 2008, the Group has been meeting its energy needs in Germany entirely with renewable energy sources via RECS, the Renewable Energy Certificate System. Green IT is also a powerful tool when it comes to achieving our environmental and climate protection goals. T-Systems' green services protect the environment by helping companies use energy and resources such as hardware, paper and travel more efficiently.
What does the term green ICT mean to you?
We take three different quality levels into consideration when talking about green ICT. At the lowest level are minimum requirements such as using the most appropriate energy sources, constantly improving how our technical systems operate and purchasing hardware that conserves resources. How easily can they be recycled, for example? How are they packaged?
We take three different quality levels into consideration when talking about green ICT. At the lowest level are minimum requirements such as using the most appropriate energy sources, constantly improving how our technical systems operate and purchasing hardware that conserves resources. How easily can they be recycled, for example? How are they packaged?
The second level involves increasing energy efficiency. We can do that by improving the effectiveness of the production units – such as storage capacity – at our data centers or cutting down on the number of servers we use while increasing capacity utilization through virtualization. We also program our computers to run more efficiently from the very start when we set up our data centers.
At the very top of it all, level three, are new technologies, some of which we employ at our company. These include wind energy, solar energy and geothermal energy. At one of our Munich data centers, we are also testing operation with a fuel cell that runs solely on biogas.
