Tale of two cities: environmental life cycle assessment for telecommunications systems: Stockholm, Sweden and Sacramento, CA

Blazek, M.; Rhodes, Sarah; Kommonen, F.; Weidman, E.

doi:10.1109/isee.1999.765852

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similar conclusions were drawn by Hischier et al [14] and Moberg et al [15] when they compared LCAs based on manufacturer data versus ecoinvent data. However, data quality is often an issue in ICT LCA studies [45,[47][48][49]. Nevertheless, future works will include manufacturing phase modeling based on more specific data to model the EBS and ecoinvent will be used for the rest of the inventory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applications and Challenges of Life Cycle Assessment in the Context of a Green Sustainable Telco Cloud

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. An LCA was conducted on a novel Telco-grade cloud technology. Server cloudification has been found to significantly reduce the environmental life cycle impacts as compared to a non-cloud situation. Improving service quality is possible without drastically increasing the life cycle impacts as compared to the non-cloud situation. In this LCA, a novel methodology was used to model electricity flows during ICT use to better reflect the temporal variation in electricity generation by utilities and electricity consumption by ICT. Nevertheless, numerous methodological challenges remain unresolved and more research is required to improve the LCA methodological framework for ICT.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applications and Challenges of Life Cycle Assessment in the Context of a Green Sustainable Telco Cloud

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Most of the lifetime costs for high-tech equipment are borne during the operations portion of the product/service lifecycle rather than during the manufacturing and shipping phases that are associated with the initial capital purchase prices of such technology. 29 Many efficiency improvements yield an annualized return on investment of 50 to 100%. Recent retrofits of 36 data centers yielded an aggregate energy savings of $2 million/year with an average payback time of less than 3 months (Fig.…”

Section: Greening the Bottom Linementioning

confidence: 99%

The business case for energy management in high-tech industries

Mills

Shamshoian²,

Blazek

et al. 2007

Energy Efficiency

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The high-technology sector -characterized by facilities such as laboratories, cleanrooms, and data centers -is often where innovation first occurs. These facilities are sometimes referred to as the "racecars" of the buildings sector because new technologies and strategies to increase performance often trickle down to other building types. Although these facilities are up to 100 times as energy-intensive as conventional buildings, highly cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities are often overlooked. Facility engineers are in the trenches identifying opportunities to improve energy productivity but often are unable to make the broader business case to financial decision makers. This article presents the technical opportunities for reducing energy costs, along with their broader strategic value for high-tech industries.

show abstract

“…While a logic chip may weigh only a few grams, the chemicals and water required to produce it weigh many kilograms. In many LCA studies of electronics, the lack of LCA data for computer chips has been noted as an important topic for future work and the need for a more detailed and transparent life-cycle inventory for semiconductor products has been noted previously [76,75,62,109,11,104].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These studies also do not report data uncertainty or discuss the influence of data uncertainty on results. Several researchers have noted that the lack of LCA data for semiconductor devices is a stumbling block in LCA of electronics, and that there is particular need for more complete or transparent LCA of semiconductors [76,75,62,109,11,104,10]. Academic work related to semiconductor LCA includes a study from Murphy which presents a methodology for parametric semiconductor life cycle inventory (LCI) models based on process specifications [62].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life-Cycle Assessment of Semiconductors

Boyd¹

2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This thesis is the first complete and transparent study of the life-cycle environmental impacts of semiconductor chips using process-level data, as well as the first analysis of the changes in these impacts over time. LCA of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic, flash memory and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) are presented. CMOS logic is the most common form of digital logic used today. This thesis provides a life cycle assessment for CMOS chips over 7 technology generations with the purpose of comparing impacts by life cycle stage, examining their trends over time and evaluating their sensitivity to data uncertainty and changes in production metrics such as yield. A hybrid life cycle assessment (LCA) model is used; Wafer production, electricity generation, water supply and certain materials are represented by process LCA data, while the remaining materials are described using economic input-output (EIO) LCA methods. It is determined that, in the case of CMOS logic, life-cycle impacts in all but one category are dominated by the use phase, and impacts are most sensitive to those variables which define use phase energy demand (chip power demand, usage patterns, power supply efficiency and chip lifetime). Using the same methodology, LCA of flash memory over 5 technology generations is presented. The most recent generation of flash memory is compared with magnetic storage, using a laptop hard-drive as a functional unit, and it is determined that in most impact categories, a flash-based drive will result in fewer impacts. Life-cycle impacts of DRAM, over 6 technology generations, are presented using as the functional unit, the memory requirements a popular operating system in each year of production. The influence of the choice of functional unit on results in semiconductor LCA is examined, and it is argued that functional unit is best defined as a computational power or memory capacity required for a given function, within a set time period. The LCA impact and inventory results for these three types of semiconductor products allow more accurate assessment of the environmental ben-1 efit or costs of information technology relative to traditional products and services.

show abstract

Tale of two cities: environmental life cycle assessment for telecommunications systems: Stockholm, Sweden and Sacramento, CA

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Applications and Challenges of Life Cycle Assessment in the Context of a Green Sustainable Telco Cloud

Applications and Challenges of Life Cycle Assessment in the Context of a Green Sustainable Telco Cloud

The business case for energy management in high-tech industries

Life-Cycle Assessment of Semiconductors

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About