There are potentially hundreds, if not thousands of ways in which we can reduce ICT's consumption of energy - we just don't have the mechanism to capture this innovation, quantify its environmental benefit and share it with corporate Australia.

One of the areas of focus for my role at Dimension Data is Green IT, and in that capacity I have attended or spoken at a number of ICT and climate change conferences over the past 12 months. At these events I've found that there is always at least one amazing green concept or innovation presented - but once the conference is over, what happens to those ideas?

Last month, I participated in a media roundtable together with other industry representatives. One of the speakers was John Maunder, CIO at the South Australian Department of Transport, Energy & Infrastructure who presented a range of lateral ideas on ways in which his department's ICT infrastructure can contribute to reducing our impact on the environment. John spoke about the idea of enabling Wi-Fi access on public transport to make it a more attractive option to commuters and thereby increase utilisation. He also explained how traffic flow systems can be applied intelligently to ensure that peak hour traffic is kept moving, reducing the time that vehicles spend on the road emitting carbon.

However, the most compelling concept John put forward was to propose that we get serious about "hot rock" technology - geothermal energy. He also suggested that we should locate data centres - one of the most significant energy consumers in ICT - at the source of these geothermal energy plants, such as in Central Australia, and transfer data from these centres to our major business centres over fibre optic cable. Why do this? Because transmitting electricity over long distances involves significant energy loss (up to 70 percent in some instances).