Speeches

While in Washington, DC, on Earth Day 2009, Paul Bell discussed how government can use "Green IT" to freeze IT-related energy consumption. During a roundtable at the National Press Club, Paul shared an IT and policy framework for government energy efficiency, and discussed how IT is key to lowering energy use and driving productivity. Following are Paul's remarks.

Paul Bell: First of all, I just want to say how much we appreciate the work the Alliance to Save Energy does. We’ve had a chance to work together for about three years now, and the work you do to promote energy saving and educating people is really valuable.

 What I wanted to do today is talk about the very broad themes about what IT can do in driving the energy consumption reduction, and give a very specific proposal for how we believe the U.S. federal government can actually cap IT energy consumption at current levels.

What we’re describing here is possible. It is being done today in certain environments, both in the public and private sector. And we think a bold mandate across the entire federal government would be very appropriate right now.

Let’s set the stage about what we’re talking about. The EPA has estimated the federal government spends about $450 million a year now on the power to run the data centers that support the federal government. And they’ve also estimated that that bill will rise to $740 million by 2011 at current rates. The underlying drivers of this, of course, are that we are driving greater adoption of IT. It’s the servers. It’s the storage. It’s all of the elements that underline that. And there are very good reasons to continue to drive adoption and use of the technology.

That is actually a good thing, but there are good ways and bad ways to do it from an energy consumption point of view. That $450 million today translates into about six billion kilowatt hours of power that are consumed. Now, here’s basically what’s going on in -- at consumption and how we can flatten it out. First of all, there’s a lot of inefficiency in the way this has all been architected, so the infrastructure that makes that happen. There are servers that are underutilized. It’s a very common pattern. In fact, it is not unusual to find across public and private sector the servers that may be only 15 percent utilized versus their full capacity.

Secondly, you have inefficient data centers, poor designs of how the power and cooling are handled. And if you take all of these problems together and put a best in class approach into both retrofitting old equipment and building the new data centers, you can flatten out the power consumption while -- continue to increase the processing power and the storage, which is inevitably going to continue and is actually good for us on the wider stage.

Let me talk about a step-by-step approach that we do this, and I’ll use a little bit of the experience that we’ve had at Dell as a pretty large global company now. We’re No. 33 on the Fortune 500 list. So we have many of the complexities that large organizations in the public and private space have. First step -- you have to go into these data centers, which have been built up over long periods of time and find the extremely underutilized servers, which, in fact, nobody is actually doing anything with. Unplug them, turn them off. It sounds real basic, but they’re all out there. They’re all over the federal government. They’re all over the economy.

Number two -- you have to look at that utilization of your servers, and in the recent years we have made huge strides as an industry in something called virtualization. Now, let me just spend a minute explaining that, because it’s what can take your utilization of your servers from maybe 15 percent on average to 70, 80 percent, which means you need less servers. You need less power consumption.

The way virtualization works -- it says instead of having an application running on one operating system, running on one machine, and you do it again for all the other applications, you can take that one machine and divide up that computing power and have different applications running a the same time on that one machine. And they can share the workload, and the systems today can do that load balancing for you. That’s what’s called virtualization of the machine. One physical machine could be five virtual machines. And that’s how you can manage the peaks and valleys of demand across that compute power, and you can get the utilization up.

This was theory four or five years ago, had been talked about for a long time, but was not really working in practice. Now it is up in production, but it is in the early stages of that production. And, you know, we are helping a lot of our customers and the public and private sector move this agenda forward, but it helps to have a bold vision for where that can go. So to use our Dell server utilization example again, we set a commitment a few years ago to be one of the top ten companies to virtualize machines, and we’re about to the point of having 9,000 machines virtualized by the end of this year, which is a tremendous savings. We actually calculate that by the end of this year we’ll have saved $52 million.

That is, by the way, in the equipment costs. So when we talk about the energy savings, the dollars of energy savings, the emissions savings -- there can also be savings in the capital expenditures that are required to drive what the federal government is doing. When you put all these together, you have an overall plan that is really very, very important for all users and managers of data centers around the world, and it is a process that is going to play out over a long period of time, and there are leaders in this process. And so we’re asking the administration to challenge the federal agencies here to cap energy consumption because it is a -- it’s a vision that everybody can get their heads around. It is technically possible. But it’s a lot of work. It takes somebody to set that vision and give them a mandate and ask them to go after it.

We’d specifically ask for four things that would underline them, we think could help it -- make it a reality. First is starting with a comprehensive assessment, perhaps led by the EPA, because they’ve done some great work in understanding what the federal government is spending, on understanding what the starting point is today, because many CIOs have not been really tracking power consumption systematically. They have not understood what it would take step-by-step and what metrics they’re working against in terms of the utilization of the servers, reducing power consumption, et cetera. So it helps to have a blueprint, and we think the EPA can do a great job of that.

Second -- require that new federal data centers -- and there’s a number on the -- in the plans here -- that they really be required to be set up with the greenest possible footprint, which is following these technologies. Third -- requiring existing federal data centers to be converted to green facilities within three years. That would give a finite date that the CIOs could work against. And fourth, connecting the federal data centers to smart grids, because that would further increase the way we’re intelligently managing and reducing the power consumption.

We think a lot of benefits would come from this. A, it works, so we know the server utilization and the power consumption would go in the right direction for the federal government. Second -- we’ve had halo effect of having really led by showing what is possible and making that a reality, would play out internationally in both the public and private sectors.

Finally, we would make some suggestions about policies that could incent the private sector to do the same thing. And some of this is happening within the discussions around how we implement the energy reduction and energy efficiency provisions within the ARRA, exactly how that money gets spent.

First would be potentially in the Small Business Administration loan program, making sure that there are investment incentives there for energy efficiency along these similar lines. Secondly, either expensing of accelerating depreciation for investments in data center technologies if they could prove that they are reducing energy consumption by at least 25 percent. That would put some skin in the game for the recipients of that benefit. And then thirdly -- tax credits for investments in projects that reduce energy demand across the board.

As I mentioned in Dell’s example, there are plenty of economic incentives for doing this right, but what we’re talking about doing is an acceleration of a process that is already underway, and, you know, it takes some vision at the top of an IT organization to make sure that the -- what can be managed is very separate programs around separate applications for separate users, is thought of holistically and managed from the point of view of how all of that is going to be run to drive the maximum energy efficiency.

I just need to close by saying that we have had a long history in the early quarter century now of working with the U.S. federal government in all, you know, different facets of it, and we understand the complexities. In fact, I was meeting with two CIOs of large federal government organizations yesterday. They’re excited about this vision when we talk to them at this level, but there are real challenges internally and organizationally, and so we think that leadership from the top that empowers them to do what they recognize as being very valuable for the organization would be extremely timely.

With that, we’ll take any questions you might have.

PARTICIPANT: Dell became carbon neutral in August of last year, and George Mason University has a goal of becoming carbon neutral within the next 20 years. So I was wondering what the most important steps you took to achieving this were and what we could implement to do this, to do the same?

PAUL BELL: It started with -- little bit like I talked about in our proposal here of that comprehensive assessment. People hadn’t been thinking in these terms or even tracking the right data. We didn’t even know what our carbon footprint was, for instance. We didn’t know what our energy consumption was as a company. So you had to start -- it’s easier as business people, because we’re very much into metrics and data, and, you know, quantitative outcomes. So we had to do that first.

Then you have to set the goals for reducing that consumption, and we’ve done all of the things that we talked about here in our proposal for the federal government as an IT shop, looking at IT consumption. That’s a significant amount of what we consume, because we’re IT intensive, more than most organizations. Then we looked at other things that any organization could look at, like the facilities. How do we do all the basics? In many cases, we retrofitted HVAC equipment to get more efficiency there. We implemented some tools we knew would be great for our customers that could go in and basically power down all the computer systems that were still on at night and then power them back up in the morning.

So you started with a full range of power reduction schemes throughout the company. Then we worked on converting that power to renewable power. So our campus at our global headquarters down near Austin, Texas is now running 100 percent on renewable energy. Eighty percent of it is wind. Twenty percent of it is basically capturing methane out of landfills, the decomposition of landfills and converting that into power. We have since rolled that out to a few of our other campuses, and plans are to continue to do so.

After you’ve done all that to reduce the carbon footprint, then you’re left with the carbon offsets. And we started a program a number of years ago that we just became the biggest and first user of, which we called first Plant a Tree for Me for individual consumers, and then Plant a Forest for Me for larger organizations, which basically said that as you are buying your Dell equipment, we can give you a rough calculation of what the carbon footprint of that machine is, and you can contribute to a fund where we are planting trees to offset that. And our biggest single project is actually Madagascar, which I think many of you know has experienced severe deforestation, and, you know, so far several years into this we, you know, created a space where we’ve planted tens of thousands of trees. A hundred thousand by now and growing. And so those are the steps of the campaign. And when we finally got all of that together last year, we got to the point of carbon neutrality, and now our intention is to maintain and improve that.

Editor's note: This transcript may have been edited for length and clarity. Due to varying sound quality and issues in translation/transcription, the information in this transcript may contain inaccuracies.