Fujitsu Begins Evaluating CO2 Reduction Potential from R&D Stage

Tokyo and Kawasaki, Japan, March 29, 2010

Fujitsu announced that from April 2010, 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.

This initiative will help focus development on those advanced 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.

Fujitsu already has Super Green Products⁽¹⁾, which are designed with the most advanced, environmentally friendly characteristics, and offers its customers environmentally conscious solutions⁽²⁾ that reduce their environmental footprint.

The Fujitsu Group has also set itself ambitious environmental goals for 2020 under its medium-term environmental vision, Green Policy 2020⁽³⁾. Breakthrough technologies that can dramatically reduce environmental footprints will be an important part of achieving these goals.

Fujitsu Laboratories has an established track record in R&D for environmentally beneficial technologies. Now, 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. Overall, this will enable researchers to place more emphasis on the environmental benefits of their research, and in turn, will accelerate R&D for environmentally beneficial advanced technologies.

About the Environmental Benefit Assessment Tool

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 this 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.

Additionally, with this calculation, 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.

Assessment Case Study

This assessment tool was used to perform a quantitative analysis during R&D on a gallium-nitride HEMT to be used in power supplies⁽⁴⁾. Estimating the effect that this technology would have if deployed in servers in every datacenter in Japan showed the potential for a total energy savings of 12% (330,000 tons of CO2). This assessment took into account not only the direct benefits of higher device efficiency (which could reduce power-supply losses by 1/3), but also the effects of lower server power demands (8%) and the lower air-conditioning power demands (4%) resulting from lower heat output by the server power supplies, to produce the total estimated benefit of 12%.

Future Plans

Through these efforts, Fujitsu seeks to further advance the contribution of technology to environmental sustainability. Moreover, for each technology, Fujitsu is broadly 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.

For example, by applying this type of design optimization to datacenters, Fujitsu is seeking to develop advanced technologies that will more than double their energy efficiency by the end of fiscal 2012.