Welcome and Keynote

by Lykke Friis

Danish Minister for Climate and Energy Lykke Friis

Thank you for the invitation – and the opportunity to speak here today about the vision and opportunities of Green IT and how the business community can contribute the global climate solutions.

To start out, I would like to share an analogy between the development of information technology and the potential of Green IT to create intelligent and creative solutions to the global challenges of climate change.

More than 40 years ago the founder of Intel - Gordon E. Moore - introduced the concept that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years.

This was later labelled "Moore's Law" as people realized that it could be applied as a useful indicator to describe the development and capabilities of many digital electronic devices. Such as processing speed of computers, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.

What's common to all these is that they are improving at (roughly) exponential rates, often even superseding Moores 's law doubling every 18 months instead of every two years as he predicted.

Thus, Moore's Law has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy and the law has itself turned out to be a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Today the leaders in the IT-industry use Moore's Law to inspire long term planning and to set ambitious targets for research and development. I see a huge potential if we can convey this global drive in the IT-sector to the battle of climate change, where the challenges are so huge that we need a green revolution.

I believe that Green IT holds the key to reducing - not only the carbon footprint of IT itself - but more importantly to impact, manage and reduce the carbon footprint of other sectors through energy efficiency savings and smart grids.
Also green technologies need to be disseminated to all parts of the world if it is to have any effect in solving the climate challenge. The developing countries must be supported in their "leapfrogging" towards well-developed low-carbon societies by both a global treaty with provisions for transfer of technology and by a responsible business community seizing the opportunities for green growth on a global scale.

Green IT-solutions are essential to meet and overcome these challenges and thus reduce the impact of climate change on our natural environment, whilst creating new jobs in green growth industries at the same time. And this is where we come in - again.

Denmark is well-positioned to become the new Green IT trendsetter; we have the ideal combination of world-class software development competencies and a leading energy technology cluster, turning out cutting-edge user-driven innovation. And to top this off, we have a unique business environment that is repeatedly voted the best in the world.
Our aim is to utilize our strong position to create a new green growth economy in Denmark. For instance, the Danish Business Strategy on Climate Change aims at turning Denmark into a green laboratory. The key is a dynamic framework that facilitates new climate-related solutions and encourages innovation.

Our so-called ‘Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Programme’ will continue to be a natural cornerstone of that effort. This program could be a useful step in the development of many green technologies.
But moreover, the Government devotes significant resources – the equivalent of 28 million Euros – to technological test facilities, the so-called Green Labs. The purpose of the Green Labs is to enable in particular small and medium size companies to test promising renewable energy technologies on a big scale.

We have not yet decided the exact framework for the program, but it could for instance support the creation of a large-scale test-facility needed to develop a highly flexible and intelligent energy system infrastructure with high amounts of renewable energy. One of the leading smart projects in this field is PowerLab.DK with government, universities and industry stakeholders, including IBM.

It is the Government’s intention that these measures will allow Danish and international businesses operating in Denmark to thrive and stay competitive in the new international situation.

We invite you to tap into our knowledge and experience – be it by buying Danish products and services, cooperating with Danish academic or corporate partners or locating your own green IT research, development or test activities in Denmark.

By leveraging on our experiences and joining forces, we may be able to expand the reach of Moore's Law also to Green IT. In that way we may create the green solutions of tomorrow much sooner, if not today.

by Lykke Friis