Happy belated Earth Day. We saw a tremendous amount of green news on April 22, from “The Top Ten Greenest States in U.S.” to the Earth Day Network’s “Billion Acts of Green” and even “Earth Day 2011: See which stars are going green.” But at Nexius, the April 21 publication of the Greenpeace report, “How Dirty is Your Data?,” managed to dominate the Earth Day-related news and reinforce the importance of green initiatives in business and technology.
What makes the Dirty Data report stand out? It highlights a growing trend in which more companies are being evaluated – more publicly – based on their green tech initiatives. Subtitled “A Look at the Energy Choices That Power Cloud Computing,” the Greenpeace report sheds light on “the choices being made today by major IT brands about where to site and how to power their factories.” And that light is often unflattering.
Apple, for instance, received the lowest Clean Energy Index of the surveyed companies, which included Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others. According to Greenpeace, Apple’s new $1 billion ‘iDataCenter’ in North Carolina is estimated to require as much as 100MW of power, equivalent to about 80,000 US homes or 250,000 EU homes. More, Apple – along with Facebook and Google – is part of North Carolina’s “Dirty Triangle,” where “some of the dirtiest generation mixes in the US” will power super-size data centers.
Bottom line, “How Dirty is Your Data?” and reports like it can deal IT companies a significant blow, in terms of public opinion and policy as well as profitability. What about wireless operators? How long will it be before analyst firms like ABI Research regularly issue reports on their green rankings? That firm has already demonstrated it’s up to the task in a previous study that assessed the greening of mobile networks, ranking North American wireless operators on their environmentally friendly, clean technology initiatives.
Historically, wireless operators have competed on points such as ARPU, churn, and subscriber gains. Going forward, operators may well have to compete on environmentally-focused metrics such as those used by ABI Research, e.g., green mobile network infrastructure; green buildings and facilities; green IT; handset, battery and accessory recycling; etc. Here, the competition will be for public favor as well as profits.
At Nexius, we fully expect green concerns to play an increasingly important role in wireless operators’ business and technology decisions. That expectation drove the launch of our green energy service offering. In addition to analyzing the overall OPEX spend of the operator, the new offering draws on our extensive experience in evaluating and optimizing wireless operator networks, and applies those capabilities to improving wireless operators’ green strategies. Wireless operators will find that our green energy service enhances our asset management solution by providing deeper insights into a network’s energy usage.
Now we can augment Nexius’ wireless operator solutions, including our paperless asset tracking and management solution, by offering a real-time, centralized view into operators’ actual energy consumption on a per-asset level. Monitoring energy consumption lets wireless operators improve asset efficiencies, making more informed choices on consolidation, selling and disposal of assets. The net result is that operators can cut costs not only by properly tracking their assets, but also by making informed strategic decisions on how to best utilize them as well.
Our green energy service offering can reduce wireless operators’ utility bills by up to 20 percent. Those bottom-line savings do not require a major infrastructure overhaul. More than 80 percent of a wireless operator’s energy operational expenses are directly related to electricity consumption, so we are utilizing solutions, such as eCurv’s asynchronous regulation system, to determine the wireless operator’s energy consumption, down to the individual cell site. In turn, wireless operators can calculate ROI on a per-site basis. And Nexius can assess the wireless operator’s current utilities spend and provide a detailed strategy for cost reduction on a network wide basis.
Green energy services are just another way we can contribute to wireless operators’ competitiveness – not only on network coverage and service quality but also on the amount of energy they consume. Call this contribution “the gift of green,” courtesy of Nexius and eCurv.
- Chris Haidet, Vice President of Marketing and Sales
