Green IT Amsterdam (EURECA partner) and Be Great organized a session at the EU Sustainable Energy Week 2016 in Brussels. The subject of the conference is “Urban data centres supporting local, sustainable energy systems”. We had the chance to have representatives of the FP7 Second Call cluster projects and among them: EURECA, GEYSER, GENiC, Dolfin, RenewIT.
The session on the 15th of June was dedicated to Green IT, smart green and urban datacenters, the energy chain of the internet. We aimed to raise awareness within a wide audience of European policymakers, urban planners, media and industry representatives both on the opportunities to green the internet further and on the technology initiatives the industry is taking to make this possible.
What we have learned during the session “The Internet energy chain”; is that from smart and urban datacenters to sustainable users behavior, the objective is twofold; to raise awareness amongst city planners, policy makers, IT and energy companies as well as web users, on the actual energetic and environmental impact of the ICT sector. On the other hand, to introduce solutions the sector itself is currently developing and implementing to face these challenges and to play a key role to the transition to sustainable energy.
The event, co-organised by Green IT Amsterdam (NL) and Be great (BE), was divided into two sessions of 45 minutes. Each session explored a part of the internet chain, aiming to raise awareness on how to reduce energy consumption, showcase opportunities, technology development and better practices in web user behaviours.