Unchallenged assumptions took a beating in a session from Wendell Brase of UC-Irvine at today’s Smart and Sustainable Campuses conference.

Focusing on labs and IT facilities, which often have 24/7 loads and are the fastest growing consumer of energy, Brase described data center equipment used at his campus that is designed by its manufacturers to run normally at temperatures in excess of 85 degrees, but until recently was kept in a room air conditioned to 68 degrees, which requires more energy.

“No one thought that we could do it differently than the way we always had, but it says right there in the manuals that you can safely operate the equipment this way,” said Brase. “The way to make these labs less of a burden on our carbon footprint is to make them smarter. They’re hungry, but they can be managed a lot better than we’re doing. Unfortunately, sometimes we’re still making choices based on assumptions from 1965.”

The Department of Energy estimates the growth of energy consumption from labs and IT centers at 15% per year across the country, though Brase notes the number is probably higher at a university, particularly a research institution. To compensate, UC schools have been changing their desktop power settings, closing fume hoods to save energy, consolidating equipment, and experimenting with virtualized desktops.

“We’re interested in what’s called deep energy infrastructure projects. We’re not doing a project right now unless we can save 50% of our carbon emissions,” said Brase. “We’ll get back to the 10% or 15% projects eventually, but right now it’s a matter of speed, scope and scale.”

We’re blogging the Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference at University of Maryland today and tomorrow. If you were in any of the sessions, share your notes in the comments.

While good green citizens are fond of using email to save trees, the widely-ignored fact is that those same emails take up all kinds of server space. Space which, as Warren Arbogast points out in the latest episode of Tech Therapy, isn't free, and requires a lot of electricity to run, maintain, and cool. And when we're talking about massive research and data projects, computing quickly sails to the front of the energy (and expense) line.

For example, the University of Michigan's computing is responsible for about 65 million pounds of carbon emissions annually, costing about $4.8 million in electricity bills, according to their own estimate in EDUCAUSE's white paper on the role of IT in sustainability.

So what's to be done?

Turning off computers at night is a good first step, but given that some estimates put emissions from computing at the same level as the aviation industry, much bigger steps are needed.

The key, says Arbogast, is to work systems-wide. All too often, the departments in charge of maintaining those computers never see the energy costs, making it a non-priority. When asked, he says, many IT staffers don't actually know how many servers exist at their school. So in order to conserve energy and save money, it's often necessary to get everyone in the same conversation: facilities managers, IT staff, department heads, and most importantly, whoever is in charge of the energy bill.

The University of Michigan, mentioned above, set a 10-percent reduction goal of computing energy consumption. According to the white paper, "the university is one of a handful of institutions that have joined Intel and Google in the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which hopes to cut computer energy consumption in half by 2010. The nonprofit alliance estimates that reducing consumption this much could slash carbon emissions by 54 million tons a year." Assuming energy rates remain somewhat constant, a 10% cut in electricity usage could correlate to almost $500,000 saved just in electricity charges.

To get to that ambitious number, everything from consolidating servers to Energy Star monitors will be in play.

Making more efficient "supercomputers" is also crucial, if expensive, as we noted last fall. Several universities, including Purdue and UCSD, are testing data centers that conserve as much as 40% of electricity, and the University of Maine has one that can be powered by cyclists, if anyone is so inclined.