Malaysian National Green Technology Policy

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Background

Fueled by population and economic growth, large amount of natural resources have been extensively extracted. In today advance world, electricity cannot be detached from people. However, it is not self-generated and it is not free. Nuclear, fossil fuel, and natural gas are the main resources to generate the electricity. Some resources are unsustainable and some give negative impact to the environment. For instance, the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which were reported by international energy agency to be the biggest energy supply for the world in 2007, emits large amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. CO2 is a potential element causing global warming. In general, global warming causes the temperature to rise, melting the icecap at the Arctic and Antarctic resulting in the flooding at the coastal regions [1]. On top of that, it has a catastrophic impact on global hydrological cycle which could lead to more drought, hurricanes, and storm [2], [3]. Even though there is a positive sign in some of the most advanced and developed nations such as United States on the efforts to limit her emission, some articles have reported that the efforts have failed. Looking at another side of the world, a rapid emission is booming in developing countries, where is a new target for manufacturers from developed countries because of cheaper labor and full of natural resources [4].

IT infrastructure has been known to be one of the main energy consumers, estimated to consume between 2 percent to 10 percent of worldwide energy consumption [5]. Ever increasing use of electronic equipment in many organizations escalates the power consumption. In this modern world, power consumption in the organizations is becoming one of the main emphases because most of the tasks to be accomplished required assistance from electronic devices such as handheld devices and computers. Thus, this is where green information technology comes into place.

The term "Green Information Technology" has been referred to as a way to reduce environmental effects by using information technology. It is also known as a method to use technology more effectively and efficiently. Green information technology has recently become one of the main focuses on research and practice, with its primary goal of reducing power consumption as a result of the large amount of power consumption and unintended wastage in the organizations.

Malaysian national green technology policy [6].

Malaysia is one of the nations considering going for green technology to lower down her carbon footprint and to reduce the amount of power consumption for the whole country. For instance, The National Green Technology Policy was launched by the Honorable prime minister of Malaysia on 24 July 2009 [7]. It focuses on four pillars: energy, social, economic, and environment along with a clear objective, goal, and strategic thrusts as shown in Figure 1.1.. Furthermore, six main sectors are mentioned in Malaysia’s green technology roadmap: energy, building, transportation, water and solid waste management, manufacturer, and information technology [8].

Fuel mix in total electricity generation in Malaysia, 2000–2010. [9]

At the fifteenth conference of parties (COP15) in Copenhagen, the honorable Dato Sri Mohd Najib Tun Abdul Razak, prime minister of Malaysia, announced that "Malaysia is still adopting an indicator of a voluntary reduction of up to 40% in terms of emissions intensity of gross domestic production (GDP) by the year 2020" [10]. Figure 1.2. illustrates the statistics of sources to generate power and demand of power throughout the year from 2000 to 2010 in Malaysia. We can see that the demand for electricity doubled in 2010 comparing to in 2000. Malaysia needs extra effort and considers every opportunity to keep her carbon emission low to achieve the 2020 goal. By going green, Malaysia is expected to gain some benefits in term of economy, reserving non-renewable resources, and preserving the environment [9].

Computers have been used throughout numerous organizations ever since their prices become affordable. Moreover, computers help to accelerate the work in many organizations. Unfortunately, the downsides of computer are that they consume power and generate heat. The Gartner group reported that computers and their monitors being left powering on without actual usage consumes more electricity than servers in the organization [11]. Likewise, apart from lighting, computers and its monitor are considered the top power consumer in an organization [12]. Thus, power will be continuously wasted if it is not well managed and controlled.

Consequently these reasons have led to the idea of power management to manage and control computer’s power state. Power management can be done at several levels of the computer system: the circuit level, the component level, and the operating system level.

Operating systems (OS) nowadays are developed with built-in power management features and tools allowing users to choose or customize power schemes for their computers. The power scheme controls and schedules the computer’s power state. For instance, a user could configure a computer to turn off the monitor screen, turn off the hard disks, and switch to standby/hibernation state after it is left idle for a specific amount of time.

Default power scheme was introduced in Windows based operating system as highlighted in Table 1.1.. On battery mode, the computer’s monitor will be turned off after the computer has been idle 5 minutes or more. Furthermore, if it still does not receive any interaction from the user for another 10 minutes, it will switch to a lower power state which is either standby state or hibernation state. On the other hand, on plugging-in mode, the timeout for each setting is increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes and from 15 minutes to 1 hour for "Turn off the monitor" and "System Standby" setting, respectively. There are two other rarely used options: "Turn of hard disks" and "System hibernates".

Energy consumption in U.S educational facilities by end use [13].

Large amount of funds has been allocated for energy usage in a campus. For instance, in the U.S, $100,000 worth of energy is consumed by a 50,000 square foot higher-education building each year. On top of that, the computer is the top four energy consumer in the campus consuming approximately 8% of the total power consumption as shown in Figure 1.1. [13].

Unlike in the office, in campus the usage of computers is scheduled according to a timetable which normally less than 8 hours. Without a proper control and management, large amount of energy will be wasted because users often forget or ignore to power their machines off after using.

Some organizations come up with policies and regulations to control computer power consumption by turning off computers after working hours. For UTP’s IT computer labs, a remote shutdown batch file is executed manually every weekday after 5pm or 6pm to turn off computers on the network. This operation has some drawbacks: it does not know whether the client computers are active; it may disturb users who are still working with their computers. Products which were introduced by [11], [14], [15] allow users to control and configure their computer power schemes remotely. However, for computers disconnected from the network, remote control is not possible.

Window-based OS default power scheme sets for a laptop

Battery mode

Plugged in mode

Turn off the monitor:

5 min

10 min

Turn off hard disks

0 min

0 min

System Standby

15 min

1 hour

System Hibernates

0 min

0 min

Problem Statement

The usage of existing power management schemes is still limited. For instance, according to [16], [17], which looked at the usage of power management and the monitoring of office equipment turn-off rates, the results of the study show that, of 1,280 computers at night, 54 percent were turned on with full power and 3 percent were in low power mode. The former statistic showed that more than half of the computers were always left on at night, wasting energy. The main reason for this is the lack of awareness of the existing power management tool, with other reasons like limited technical skill, and the ignorance of users.

Just by looking at a couple of computers, there is hardly any difference in the amount of power consumed by computers with the computer power management feature enabled and those with it disabled. However, consider that each computer can save 1 kWh per year by using a power management feature. How many kWh would be saved for 1,000 or 10,000 computers? How much of a reduction in CO2 emissions to the atmosphere will there be? According to Energy Star, a program that provides labeling for energy-efficient equipment, the amount of energy saved in America alone by using the Energy Star function has increased more than triple from 59 billion kWh in 2000 to 213 billion kWh in 2010 [18]. It is believed that the amount of saving will continue to increase if more and more people start to realize the benefit of the program.

People’s knowledge of the benefit of saving energy is still affected by their false assumptions. They take for granted that the resources generating power will never be used up and so unintentionally wasting power. For instance, lights, air conditioners, computers, and others are always left on even though there is no one using them for works.

With a preliminary result from an observation in an early stage of this research in a few computer labs in the campus shows that there are less than 25 percent of the computers utilizing power management setting. Among the power managed computers, we notice that the most utilized feature was "turn off display" associated with the timeout range from 10 minutes to 1 hour. Moreover, we observe a computer lab after practical session at 12 PM; we notice that 25 out of 35 computers were still on. This promotes a problem of wasteful power consumption, even though a remote shutdown batch file are executed after the office hour to shut down all computers because during the time computer sit idling, they also consume power.

Power management mechanism, which was used by built-in power management tool, still solely depends on static idle timeout which must be enabled and preset by users. For instance, PCs’ power transitions from active state to "turn off display" state after 10 minutes of inactive. Although it helps to reduce PC power consumption, the amount of wasted power while waiting for idle time to exceed is still considered much.

Research Question

The research questions for this thesis are:

"What are the factors contributing to excessive computer power consumption?

Can computer power event and application idle time be used as a parameter to help reducing computer power consumption?

How to exploit the power event and idle time, by keeping its complexity low, for the benefit of reducing computer power wastage?

Objectives

This study would be mainly on the factors and issues surrounding computers power management, e.g. what are the factors that lead to people ignoring the possibilities of reducing computers power consumption, and what are the motivating factors that make people willingly conserve the energy through computer power management tools or utilities.

Based on these studies, a framework and a prototype application are proposed to look into computer power management mechanism that incorporate the power transition event and application idle time that exploits the user’s activities history to dynamically choose and select a suitable timeout schedule to switch the computer to a low power state. This is expected to help reduce idle time or waiting time for the computer which depends on a static time out to switch to a low power state.

The main objectives of this research project are:

To explore factors and issues that influence computer power consumption and monitor user activities and computer usage patterns in the practical computer lab and working environment.

To improve effectiveness of the built-in power management tool in OS by proposing a power event and an idle time profiling components to extend the power management functionality and to reduce the waiting time to switch the computers to a lower power state.

Scope and Constraints

The power management mechanism proposed in this research includes the combination of a monitoring tool and a dynamic timeout-based power management scheduler. The tool implemented based on a proposed model or framework that utilizes the user’s activities captured by the proposed monitoring tool. Two environments are selected for implementing this idea, which are a practical computer lab and an office located in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP).

The Constraints of this research are:

The proposed power management tool is written in C# and running on Windows based operating system. It has been tested on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Some functions, which are available for laptop, are not supported by the desktop because of hardware compatibility.

The sample data is extracted from a proposed monitoring tool based on two features, which are power transitioning event feature and application idle time feature. As the sample data are stored in log files, it is assumed that the application has the permission to write and override the log files in particular folder in the computer.

Contribution of the Research

Upon completion, this research will contribute to Green Information Technology specifically in the domain of Energy Conservation and Energy Efficiency. The potential contributions are listed as follows:

Filling a knowledge gap in the area of computer power management by looking at its characteristics and possible solutions (using power transition and application idle time profiling) to minimize power wastage.

Identifying the significance to look at new parameters (power transition event and application idle time) that can be used to save power consumption by reducing the waiting time from computer being idle without any usage.

Development of a new method which utilizes the dynamic/adaptive time-out based computer power management in each computer.

Development of a computer power management prototype tool that utilizes the proposed method.

The work in this thesis has resulted in the following publication and exhibition:

Chan Piseth, Alan Oxley, and Low Tan Jung, "Dynamic PC Power State Transitioning based on a Monitoring Service," in International Conference on Computer & Information Science, 2012, pp. 237–241.

Display Power Management Based on Application Idle Time Profiling (DPMaitp), exhibited at Science and Engineering Design Exhibition 30 (SEDX30) in August 2012, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. (Silver Medal)

Organization of the Thesis

This thesis is organized into seven chapters with brief description of each chapter as follows:

Chapter 1 presents a brief overview on green information technology from the world and Malaysia perspective, computers power consumption in an organization, and overview of power management, and how green information technology relates to computer power management.

Chapter 2 highlights some motivations to reduce power consumption through power management, and the factors contributing to high computer power management issue. Moreover, power management solutions, algorithms, tools and systems, developed in the past, are also discussed as part of related works.

Chapter 3 discusses the research methodology, software development methodology, and data analysis methodology.

Chapter 4 highlights the proposed method and components to improve the traditional power management.

Chapter 5 explains the prototype power management tool built for this research, Dynamic Time-out Power Management, and discusses its architecture and the related system flow.

Chapter 6 presents the result of statistical analysis for the proposed components, and the outcomes of the prototype tool implemented in a practical computer lab and in volunteers’ computer.

Chapter 7 concludes the thesis and some suggestions for future works are presented.