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ICT can help cut emissions
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 04 November 2008, 20:30 IST
Mumbai: A more persistent use of information and communication technology (ICT) can help reduce emissions and fight climate change. The annual manmade global emissions can be minimized by 15 percent by 2020 if there is an alteration in the way people use ICT. It will also bring over $800 billion as energy efficient savings to global businesses, according to the report published by independent non-profit organisations, The Climate Group and Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI).
The study has acknowledged four major segments where ICT can bring in change to fight climate change. These include smart building design and use, smart logistics, smart electricity grids and smart industrial motor systems. They will be in addition to applications such as tele-working, video-conferencing, e-paper and e-commerce.
India can make a significant contribution with the possibility of smart grid technologies globally reducing over two giga tons of CO2 emissions worth approximately $125 billion. The Indian power sector has lost over 30 percent of the generated power through aggregated technical commercial losses and adding reduction of these losses by 30 percent is possible through better monitoring and management of electricity grids. This could be done first with smart meters and then through integrating more advanced ICTs into the energy internet.
The study also predicted that the PC ownership will quadruple between 2007 and 2020 to four billion devices and the emissions will double over the entire telecom infrastructure.
Currently, the global emission by ICT is two percent and expected to increase to six percent a year and double by 2020 driven by technology uptake in India, China and rest of the world.
