Meet Justine, our new Green Services Coordinator. She’s smart, enthusiastic, and a hard worker. We hired Justine to help Tech Networks on all sustainability fronts. But, for now, she’s doing most of the heavy lifting on our Green IT services methodology. Today she was diving in to the subject of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS’s). Did you know that a UPS hooked up to equipment that draws less than 30% of the rated output of the unit, the UPS’s efficiency can drop dramatically?

The toughest problem Justine is facing right now is with computing “in the cloud.” So-called “Cloud Computing” is a catchall phrase to describe the various types of Internet-based solutions, from Gmail to Salesforce.com. With cloud computing, you don’t know where your data is actually stored, much less how much it is contributing to global warming.

When our Green IT services methodology is released to the public, we hope that we will be able to call on Cloud computing providers to be more transparent about where they are storing their clients’ data and how much energy they are using to do it.