Green IT: Harvesting Heat using TPV (Thermophotovoltaic)

Information technology (IT) has revolutionized our modern life and contributed significantly to economic and social prosperity. IT is moving at an incredible pace. Yet, there is a downside to IT expansion.

The energy consumption for IT is significantly high especially if we consider the total life cycle of IT products and datacenters power usage.

In view of the above concern, IT professionals are now turning to Green-IT in order to develop IT activities in a sustainable manner.

In fact, Green-IT includes all practices that aim to reduce the environmental impact of IT use. It is mainly about energy efficiency, environmentally friendly products and proper disposal of IT products.

In this paper I will start by defining Green-IT, the ecological issues related to it and the need to adopt this. Then I will describe a method using the TPV (Thermo -photovoltaic) that will help to reduce the ill-effects of the heat dissipated from data centre's thus encouraging the practice of Green-IT.