February 19th, 2009
Green tech calculators you can count on, literally
For those seeking practical tools that can help them get a better handle on the energy and carbon dioxide emissions they’re producing, I have not one but three different online calculator type tools to point to in this blog entry. They aren’t exactly comparable, but serve different purposes that might suit some of your fact-gathering needs.
The first (only because it is independent not necessarily because it is better) comes from the green IT analysts over at Forrester. This blog entry explains the thinking behind the new Forrester tool for creating a baseline measure of the energy and carbon emissions profile related to your information technology. Gathering these statistics will help you quantify potential savings for the financial sorts and also give you something to measure against. Plus, I’m sure that by checking out what companies REALLY look like in these areas, it will be able to share out some aggregate best practices for all of us.
If you are a small business hoping to get a better handle on the totality of your business’ environmental impact, hosting company Rackspace has released a new calculator for its customers that was developed by NativeEnergy, one of the carbon offset companies. Here’s the Rackspace calculator, where you can mess around with scenarios regarding the impact of servers, travel, facilities and so on.
The final technology worth pointing to comes from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft.
The company has created a free add-on module for Dynamics AX 2009 called the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard. The software is intended to help midsize companies capture and track the data they need to monitor and address energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The metrics map to the key performance indicators for core environmental sustainability as identified by the Global Reporting Initiative, which is part of the United Nations Environment Program.
You can watch a demo of the tool here.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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