smarter energy

Recently, Bell Labs formed a group of networking and computing firms called “Green Touch.” The group’s life-changing mission? By the year 2015, use only a ten-thousandth of the energy necessary to power global telecoms network today. To put things in perspective, this enormous amount of energy saved prevents 300 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

Only using 1% of the energy we use today by 2015 seems like a huge task. But engineers at AT&T, Stanford University, MIT, Samsung, and other research centers or mobile operators are making progress towards that ambitious goal. Bell Labs is progressing on research regarding the capturing of signals from loud “noise” more efficiently through “smarter” coding. Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne plans to focus on developing a “sleep mode” for broadband modems, saving packets of energy. Young Mo Kim of Samsung takes a different approach in emphasizing changes to memory and display capabilities of hardware. Jeong Kim of Bell Labs introduces even another tactic to save a whole lot of energy: encourage cellphone users to utilize their cellphone batteries in a more efficient way.

In 2007, scientists predicted that global warming would advance at an increased rate in 2009. With the Kyoto Protocol’s run ending in 2012, and the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference (2009) ending with few immediate signs of radical global warming prevention measures, perhaps “Green Touch” can save the Earth, one ton of carbon dioxide emissions at a time.
​
GTB