Today, Alcatel-Lucent announced 18 new members of the Green Touch Consortium. Professors Peter Kinget and Nicholas Maxemchuk from the Electrical Engineering Department are the Columbia representatives in this consortium.
GreenTouch is a consortium of leading industrial and university research partners in the telecommunications sector. Energy consumption in the communications and information sector has been growing at a rate that is much faster than that of other sectors, and is becoming a major energy consumer. The consortium is defining the challenges and developing solutions that will reduce energy consumption without reducing the innovations that are moving our economy forward. Their goal is to reduce energy consumption by a factor of 1000 over the next 5 years. In June 2010, GreenTouch received an award for energy efficiency innovation at the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards event. For more information, go to www.greentouch.org.