By George Babinov, SBS expert.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have made significant contributions to business innovation and wealth generation for organisations, societies and nations. Unfortunately, ICT have also made significant contributions to environmental degradation. The disposal of hundreds of millions of computers and wireless and mobile devices in land-fill each year results in further contamination. Office, home and access network equipment energy consumption should also be considered. [1]

In order to fulfill the second phase of the European Commission mandate M/462 [2], ETSI Technical Committee on Access, Terminals, Transmission and Multiplexing (ATTM) has initiated five new work items related to the creation of European norms for energy management of ICT equipment and networks [3]:

• EN 305 200-1 Energy management; Operational infrastructures; Global Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); Part 1: General requirements;
• EN 305 200-2-1 Energy management; Operational infrastructures; Global KPIs; Part 2: Specific requirements; Sub-part 1: ICT Sites;
• EN 305 200-2-2 Energy management; Operational infrastructures; Global KPIs; Part 2: Specific requirements; Sub-part 2: Fixed broadband access networks;
• EN 305 200-2-3 Energy management; Operational infrastructures; Global KPIs; Part 2: Specific requirements; Sub-part 3: Mobile broadband access networks.
• EN 305 200-3-1 Energy management; Operational infrastructures; Global KPIs; Part 3: ICT Sites; Sub-part 1: Dataprocessing and Communication Energy Management (DCEM);

After approval these standards will be directly applicable in all European member states.

Preparatory works at ATTM technical committee (in workgroup AT2) for the completion of the above European norms have been started several years ago with the elaboration of ETSI standards of the series ES 205 200. These standards are in different stage of development – some of them are already published, others are still drafts.

Confronted by the necessity to respond to growing environmental concerns in society, regulatory imperatives and market pressure, many business leaders express uncertainty about how best to proceed. The challenges of environmental sustainability are particularly acute for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) due to their limited capabilities to initiate significant change without external assistance. Additionally in SMEs the target-oriented implementation of promising measures is impeded by different obstacles such as unattractive amortisation times, lack of transparency or high efforts (personnel/time).

When published the standard ES 205 200-3 Energy management; Global KPIs; Operational infrastructures; Part 3: Global KPIs for ICT Sites, will be a useful guide as its aim is to explain the purpose of the ES 205 200 series to non-experts and the objective application of the defined global KPIs.

References:

[1]   Steve Elliot, ‘Developing Organizational Capabilities in SMEs: Enabling Environmentally Sustainable ICT’, Bled 2009 Proceedings, 01.01.2009.

[2]   M/462: Standardisation mandate addressed to CEN, CENELEC and ETSI in the field of ICT to enable efficient energy use in fixed and mobile information and communication networks.

[3]   ETSI ATTM Work Programme (https://portal.etsi.org/tb.aspx?tbid=689&SubTB=689