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Alcatel Lucent's Bell Labs launches Green Touch
By siliconindia
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Friday, 15 January 2010, 19:36 IST
London: Green Touch, a global consortium has been launched, organized by Alcatel Lucent's Bell Labs whose goal is to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are currently.
Green Touch brings together leaders in industry, academia and government labs to invent and deliver radical new approaches to energy efficiency that will be at the heart of sustainable networks in the future. With its launch, the consortium also has issued an open invitation to all members of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) community to join forces in reaching this ambitious target.
"Global challenges have always been best addressed by bringing together the brightest minds in an unconstrained, creative environment. This was what we used when putting a man on the moon and is the same approach we need to implement to address the global climate crisis. The Green Touch initiative is an example of such a response - bringing together scientists and technologists from around the world and from many different disciplines in an environment of open innovation to attack the problem from many different directions," said Dr. Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy.
"The ICT sector is perfectly placed to bring its innovative and technological forces to bear in the low carbon transition as well as in curbing its own carbon footprint. The Green Touch Initiative shows how businesses can play their part in delivering the low carbon society we are working to achieve. With the government creating an environment in which innovation can flourish, we welcome industry coming together with academia to create the research, technology and solutions necessary to reduce carbon emissions," said Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, UK.
Over the next decade billions more people will upload and share video, images and information over public and private networks as we communicate with each other in new, rich ways. The Green Touch expects ICT usage to dramatically increase as other industries use networks to reduce their own carbon footprints. This naturally leads to an exponential growth in ICT energy consumption which we, as an industry, have to jointly address.
"The Green Touch is unique in looking way beyond making incremental efficiency improvements and tapping into innovation and expertise from around the globe to achieve fundamental breakthroughs in ICT carbon emissions reduction," Gee Rittenhouse, Vice President of research at Bell Labs and consortium lead.
