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The Green Campus
IT Meets BAS
5/1/2008
Universities have buildings and plants with systems which, in a green world, need to be monitored cohesively via building automation systems, or BAS. Now it's critical that those systems are integrated with IT.
MOST GREEN PROJECTS are relatively easy to carry out in a university setting, but IT systems present unique challenges. In this first of our new series on The Green Campus, CT speaks with Denis Du Bois, a specialist on green energy and technology, editor of Energy Priorities magazine, blog contributor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, host of the Energy Minute Podcast series, and member of the board of the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest.
Campus Technology: What does green information technology mean, in the context of higher education institutions? What should university CIOs, for example, be thinking about when they plan the greening of campus data centers?
DuBois: University CIOs can have an important impact on green information technology. The question is whether they want to lead or follow trends. They should think of computing in general as part of a supply chain: Components need to be recycled, there are energy inputs, the equipment takes up space that has to be cooled, and workers need access to the equipment. All of these have environmental influences. Within the data center, CIOs need to think of these broader influences, although they certainly should think about tactical things like new processes and new servers. Pretty soon everybody's favorite server will be available in green.
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