Bill Weihl, Google's green-energy czar, has been worrying about the environment for much of his IT career, including 10 years teaching computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and five more as a research scientist at the famed DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif. In 2004, he left Akamai, a content-delivery company where he was chief technology officer, to figure out how he could use his skills to help fight climate change.
In February, 2006, he was hired by California-based Google; he says his job is "to figure out what it would mean to make our operations greener and to make it happen." He's also vice-president of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium of IT companies pushing for higher efficiency standards in the industry.
You've been working in IT for 20-plus years. How has it evolved on the green side?
Bill Weihl: Ten years ago, no one outside of a few researchers talked about energy efficiency, because most computers didn't use much power, and there weren't that many of them, so the overall impact was so small as to be irrelevant from an environmental standpoint. Now, the industry has begun to wake up to the fact that there are a lot of computers out there — over a billion PCs around the world. And there will be 2.5 billion in a few short years. Individually, each one's like a light bulb. But add them all up, and it's a lot of energy.
Unfortunately, most people don't think of their computers as energy-sucking appliances: They leave them on 24 hours a day. How do we change that?
BW: One answer is that you educate people, show them that you can spend an extra $10 or $20 now to buy this computer and it will actually save you $50 over the next three years. So, it's partly a matter of what option you make easier.
And until recently, the easy option has been the cheaper, less-efficient PC.
This is a case of what economists call a market failure, where the right thing for the economy and for consumers is to buy the more efficient computer. If people were doing that in volume, the price premium would be very small, if not zero.
What will it take to make that happen?
BW: That's one of the reasons we started the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, to get manufacturers to agree on efficiency standards, and to get purchasers to commit to buying high-efficiency systems. And the assumption, which I think is a reasonable one, is that will drive down the price premium to the point where there won't be an advantage to building and buying a less efficient system. That's a voluntary thing, though. In other [industries], there have been times when governments have stepped in to regulate.
Give me some examples.
BW: The refrigerator you can buy today is bigger and has more features than one you would have bought 30 years ago and uses one quarter of the energy. Mostly, that was because of standards imposed by the California Energy Commission. The industry fought it tooth-and-nail, claiming it would be incredibly expensive, and for the first year or two, there was a moderate cost premium. But it came down very quickly, because very smart engineers who build those appliances were competing with each other, so they figured out how to drive costs out of the system.
