BT plans global carbon reduction push

BT today announced plans to reduce its global carbon emissions by 80% over the next 12 years at a pace of about 10% a year. BT also announced a new model aimed at helping corporations measure and track their carbon emissions, to help promote a reduction in those emissions that have led to global climate change.

The model, known as the Climate Stabilization Intensity Target, sets a company’s carbon intensity, or carbon dioxide emitted per unit of contribution to the global economy, according to Dr. Chris Tuppen, the man who developed it. The CSI Target is then set for reducing that carbon intensity, in line with world targets to reduce total CO2 emissions per unit of GDP. The CSI Target has earned the endorsement of The Carbon Disclosure Project, and is in line with United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“If the world is going to reduce its emissions to stabilize the climate, in developed countries those emissions have to go down 10% a year per unit of GDP,” Tuppen said. “That’s the scale of the challenge that we collectively have in front of us. At BT as a company – we have to reduce at that same rate.”

Later this month, Tuppen said, the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSi) will issue its reports based on a comprehensive view of the carbon footprint of the entire Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry itself that will include an in-depth look at all the ways in which ICT can be use to reduce carbon emissions globally.

BT is working on three separate fronts to achieve its carbon emission reduction goals, Tuppen said. Those include: driving energy efficiency in all aspects of BT’s business, building on-site renewable sources of energy to power its network and buying low-carbon electricity wherever possible.

To operate more efficiently, as BT installs its next-generation network globally, “we have built in energy-efficiency requirements into contracts with suppliers, and we cool those network nodes with fresh air cooling, which is not the way many data centers work today,” Tuppen said. “In one of our NGN nodes, 20% of the energy cools the equipment and 80% runs it, wherase in data centers, it’s more like a 50-50 split.”

BT is exploring ways to turn broadband technology from an always-on technology to an available-when-needed technology so that both network-based gear and premises-based equipment would be powered down when not in use, Tappen said. And BT is trying to do more remote diagnostics to reduce the number of truck rolls.

“We need the industry to buy into it and manufacturers to buy into it,” Tuppen said. “We are working in the standards organizations in the telecom sector to try to build this stuff into future standards, and we will implement this into our networks.”

BT is beginning to use wind power, from wind turbines, in the U.K., and exploring solar power as well, including the large photo voltaic array being installed over the parking lot and roof of the Los Angeles, Calif., U.S. headquarters building.

BT also is working with its large business customers, including governmental units, to help them identify ways to reduce carbon emissions and is replacing digital cordless phones that it sells to its consumer customers with new models that “have half of energy consumption of the old ones,” Tuppen said. “They will have much more energy-efficient transformers on there. That alone is going to save 200,000 tons of CO-2 over three years. And it will save our customers $39 million pounds on electricity bill over three years.”