Konferenzbeitrag
Environmental Informatics Prize for Students: Towards more Transparency in Supporting a Green Web
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Datum
2012
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Shaker Verlag
Zusammenfassung
The resource and power consumption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) increased rapidly in
the last years and is still increasing. One big player regarding the energy consumption within the ICT is represented
by the World Wide Web. Since it gains soaring importance in nearly every branch of industry the number of servers
is also growing. This has sufficient influences on our environment. On the one hand there are the greenhouse gases
(GHG) produced in the process of production of these servers and on the other hand there are greenhouse gases produced while operating the devices. In this case we have to have a look at the energy that is used to run the server.
When there is no label displayed on a website we surf on, we do not know which quality of energy is used. Is it
atomic, renewable or any other kind of energy? Because of this it is important to achieve some transparency. This is
interesting for every stakeholder but particularly for the end user. Hence, we developed the Green Power Indicator
(GPI), that visualizes this information for web users. Our tool displays the class of energy the data center, hosting the
current website, is powered by. We distinguish between three classes of energy, which are described in detail below.
In addition, we will go into the technical details of the extension and introduce some further developments in this
context. The Add-on is also able to show the status of a website before you surf on the specific website. With this
opportunity the user can decide whether to click on a green link or not.
We will also inform about other approaches towards a greener web including Green Web Initiatives and other Addons. Furthermore we will give a short introduction in Eco Labels and present research results. After describing the
GPI, which is based on the extension introduced in (Naumann/Gresk/Schäfer 2008), we will give some background
information including the development of the tool and, in order to get an impression of the student work behind the
development of the Add-ons, we will also give a description of the students’ projects on the Environmental Campus
Birkenfeld.