Fujitsu has said that for all advanced technologies under development in its laboratories, it will begin quantifying the potential reduction in CO2 emissions from using products and services that incorporate these technologies.
According to the company, this initiative will help focus development on those technologies that can contribute the most to the environment. By implementing these technologies in their products and services, Fujitsu Group companies will be able to help their customers and society at large reduce their environmental footprint.
Individual researchers will be able to directly evaluate the potential environmental benefit of their research themselves using the environmental benefit assessment tool to quantify the potential reduction in CO2 emissions from the use of products and services that incorporate their technologies.
Researchers will evaluate new technology from the perspective of environmental benefit in addition to the traditional criteria of performance, quality and cost, leading to an optimized assessment, the company said.
Estimates for the electricity consumed by the new technology, the number of processes required, the modes of use for products and services incorporating it (scale and hours of use) are all entered into the environmental benefit assessment tool, along with data on the current technology used. These figures are converted to their CO2 equivalent values and totaled to produce a quantitative estimate of the technology’s potential to reduce CO2 emissions.
By using a roadmap that makes explicit the relationship between a technology and the commercialization plan for products and services using it, the ways that customers will use those products and services are brought into sharper relief and the data needed for the quantitative assessment become clearer, the company said.
Through these efforts, Fujitsu seeks to further advance the contribution of technology to environmental sustainability. Moreover, for each technology, Fujitsu is promoting designs optimized for their benefits to the environment, both in products and services incorporating each technology as well as in the systems that deploy them, including operations management.
By applying this type of design optimization to datacenters, Fujitsu is seeking to develop technologies that will enhance their energy efficiency by the end of 2012.
The Fujitsu Group has set itself environmental goals for 2020 under its medium-term environmental vision, Green Policy 2020. Technologies that can reduce environmental footprints will be an important part of achieving these goals, the company added.