From ON Magazine
By Jean Gogolin
High schools with solar panels. Robust recycling programs. Water reclamation. Data centers that are virtualizing servers and storage. Across the United States, cities and states are "going green".
They're conserving natural resources, reducing their carbon footprints and minimizing the environmental impact of growing populations. Bellevue, Washington, even has a big-footed cartoon character named Carbon Yeti to encourage its citizens to reduce their footprint by conserving energy and recycling. ON looks at the efforts being undertaken by Bellevue, St. Petersburg, Florida, and a key state department in Massachusetts.
The view from Bellevue
Once just a suburb of Seattle, Bellevue now has a population of 120,000. The city has been called one of the most livable in America, with extensive parks and canoeing within an easy walk of a newly vibrant downtown. In cooperation with the Pacific Science Center, the city has built an environmental education center that perches over Mercer Slough, the largest of Lake Washington's freshwater wetlands and Bellevue's largest park. It has even instituted a program to preserve its tree canopy.
Bellevue focused its efforts to "go green" three years ago by starting a multi-pronged approach called the Environmental Stewardship Initiative. The city is transitioning its municipal vehicles to hybrids. At the city hall's central concourse, there are auto-sensors that open windows for natural ventilation. Municipal employees who carpool or use public transportation can use city vehicles to run errands during the day and are guaranteed a ride home if they need to stay late. Bellevue has converted its traffic lights to LEDs and is running a pilot program for more energy-efficient street lighting. It has instituted vigorous outreach programs further encouraging citizens to reduce the city's carbon footprint.
Says Sheida Sahandy, assistant to City Manager Steve Sarkozy and senior policy advisor for strategic planning, "Like most cities, we have vertically organized departments for transportation, utilities, parks, and so on. But our environmental actions cut across all those silos, so we've developed a horizontal initiative that weaves across these departments."
Bellevue officials took a baseline inventory of the city's emissions, both as a municipality and as a community, in 2001 and 2006. Then they did a "backcast" to 1990 to establish a benchmark and forecasts to 2010 and 2020 that take likely population growth into account. Together, the data are being used to plan future steps.
IT does its part
Bellevue's IT operations group has undertaken strong green initiatives. Four years ago, the city's data center began decommissioning servers and moving applications to VMware, putting 30 applications on one host. The city is studying virtual storage as well, and is committed to Energy Star compliance for its PCs, laptops, monitors, and printers.
Other moves include turning off PCs at night, setting monitors to turn off after a period of inactivity, using biodegradable materials wherever possible, setting printers for double-sided printing, monitoring power use, and encouraging major vendors to institute their own green initiatives. Future plans include more videoconferencing and increasing equipment lifecycles.
The goal, says CTO Chelo Picardal, is to shrink the IT department's energy consumption significantly to support the city's commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Conserving energy in St. Pete
St. Petersburg, Florida, is another city at the ocean's edge, and like Bellevue, it offers extensive amenities, among them more than 90 miles of biking and walking trails, the largest network in the southeast United States. Its environmentally conscious citizens and businesses recycle 50 percent more than the national average. Some 80 percent of its population of 250,000 has Internet access.
Mayor Rick Baker, now in his second term, has aggressively encouraged green initiatives. Two years ago, working with the Florida League of Cities, he instituted the Mayors' Green City Action Accord to establish pragmatic, measurable, and cost-effective criteria for environmental enhancements and energy savings. Baker also co-chairs the state's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change.
More than 60 Florida cities have signed the Green City Action Accord, and according to Mike Connors, administrator of St. Pete's environmental services, other cities throughout the country have expressed interest.
A first for Florida
St. Pete was the first city in the state to be named a "green city" by the Florida Green Building Coalition. Like Bellevue, St. Pete has converted its traffic signals to LEDs, which will save $150,000 a year. The city has programs to conserve water, preserve estuaries, and use fuel-efficient technologies. Recently, it announced an executive order to create a "carbon scorecard" to measure facility energy use, use ethanol and biodiesel in the city's vehicle fleet, and convert incandescent lights to compact fluorescent ones.
The city has one of the country's largest reclaimed water systems as well as a highly successful yard-waste-to-mulch program. One of its high schools meets 15 percent of its energy requirements with solar panels.
One of the area's most impressive environmental projects is the Pinellas County Waste-to-Energy Facility, which annually converts 124,000 tons of incinerated garbage to electricity—enough, when fed into the area's power grid, to supply electricity to 45,000 homes, or about a sixth of the county. Nearly 85 percent of all garbage collected in St. Pete is converted to electricity at the plant, which although built in the 1970s, is still state-of-the art and emits significantly less greenhouse gases than many comparable facilities. The facility uses magnets to separate metals from trash, so they, too, can be recycled.
Virtualization is key
St. Pete's IT department began "going green" four years ago and has since virtualized 17 servers onto two. The department already has a storage area network, which stores information more efficiently than individual units at lower cost. Explains city CIO Muslim Gadiwalla, "Every piece of equipment we buy is Energy Star-certified, and systems are set to 'wake-on LAN' so upgrades can be done at night without leaving them on all night. When we retire servers, we use them for testing."
"We're looking at desktop virtualization—in effect, going back to the days of dumb terminals—and we're studying a variety of ways to use less power to cool our data centers."
Moving city services online reduces the energy impact of citizens having to travel to City Hall to access services. It also reduces financial and environmental costs related to printing, mailing, and disposal of the resulting paper. The city has begun online billing for utility service and is handling recruitment, vendor registration, requests for proposals (RFPs), and purchase orders online as well.
MassDEP steps up
In Massachusetts, the state Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) is part of the Executive Office of Energy and Environment, a linkage only a few other states have made. MassDEP's IT department, headed by CIO Deborah Quinn, is centralized in Boston and has four regional offices with network managers.
Quinn echoes the explosion-of-servers problem experienced by Bellevue and St. Petersburg. "We used to get a new server virtually every time we added a new application," says Quinn. "By the time we got to 80, we had massive storage problems. So in early 2008, we put together a proposal to virtualize them."
Since then, the department has decommissioned 52 servers and now uses a blade system with six blades. Noting the side benefits of virtualization, Quinn says, "We've cut the time it takes to set up a new service from a day and a half to a half hour. Before we virtualized, we were just doing incremental backups because full backups took so long. Now we can do a full backup in 24 hours, which means we can do them over the weekend. We're more efficient, we're using less energy for cooling, and we're able to tackle projects that had been sitting on the back burner."
Quinn says her department has benchmarked how much energy it's using and is looking at additional ways to reduce its carbon footprint. "Our goal is to put as much information online for officials and average citizens as possible, so people will have less need to drive to our regional offices."
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