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Jens Gröger

Öko Institut e.V.

Green IT / Sustainable Information Technology

Jens Gröger has been working as a senior researcher at the Öko-Institut in Berlin in the division of products and material flows since 2009. His research focuses on sustainable information and communication technology (ICT). He develops methods for assessing the energy efficiency of computers, software, telecommunications networks, and data centres. He advises German and European authorities on defining sustainability criteria for eco-labels, public procurement, and legislative projects. He has conducted sustainability assessments for a wide range of ICT products, such as computers, smartphones, televisions, video conferencing systems, servers and storage products, and derived minimum requirements for the German Blue Angel eco-label. In 2011, together with the German Federal Environment Agency, he presented the Blue Angel for data centres, the world's first scientifically based eco-label for the data centre industry. A key question in his research is which methods are suitable for determining the environmental impact of hardware and software as well as complex systems composed of them. In addition to the application of product-related life cycle assessments, Jens Gröger, together with academic partners, has developed key performance indicators for calculating the resource efficiency of data centres (KPI4DCE), criteria for assessing the sustainability of software (SSD) and a methodology for disclosing the environmental footprint of cloud services (GCC).

In his keynote, Jens Gröger presents what the main challenges are for information technology to become more sustainable. Which indicators and measures would be suitable for making software more efficient and hardware more resource-efficient? How can data centres make their contribution to climate protection and how could sustainable information technology become a self-propelling process?