The Equation project, launched on November 29th 2011, is based on a public-private partnership with the aim of developing and demonstrating new ICT products and services for reducing CO2 emissions and energy consumption, and in general ICTs with a positive environmental impact on Quebec, Canada and the world.
For many years, the carbon footprint of the ICT industry has grown at a rapid rate. Today, this sector is developing energy-efficient and carbon-neutral ICTs that directly address this issue.
Although we face major economic, social and environmental challenges as a society, green ICTs offer powerful solutions. Our energy is clean and our future is green. Beginning today, we are building the sustainable Québec of tomorrow.
We are combining our R&D expertise, capabilities and resources to establish a powerful green ICT project with some of the greatest innovators in Québec. Together, we will bring our creativity, know-how and ingenuity to bear to create a more prosperous green economy.
Over the last few years, Prompt has been advocating Green ICT as a major opportunity for the ICT community and the broad set of ICT users throughout various sectors of human activity. Green ICT has been shown to represent a potential opportunity of $800 billion per year in energy efficiency worldwide as well as of a 15% reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.
As part of the 2010-2013 Quebec Research and Innovation Strategy (QRIS), the non-profit industry-university R&D consortium Prompt has been selected by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade (MDEIE) to develop and coordinate a major initiative on this theme with an initial core of 6 companies identified by the MDEIE.
Prompt and the six industry partners involved in the genesis of the project, now called “Equation”, acknowledge the Quebec government’s leadership for having recognized not only this undeniable economic opportunity for the ICT sector, but also the strategic value of Green ICT concepts for any jurisdiction, such as Quebec, rich in renewable and clean energies. Indeed, as Green ICTs offers a concrete potential for fighting climate change, they can also form the basis for a digital strategy in the 21st century carbon economy. As ICTs are also ubiquitous productivity tools in all sectors of human activity, they offer an unparalleled potential to reconcile economic and sustainable development.
The Equation project draws on various ICT subsectors in which Quebec industry has leading expertise, such as microelectronics, optics-photonics, wireless, hardware and computing services and telecommunications. Specifically, the project will accelerate product development in the realm of “telco cloud” and cloud computing infrastructures as well as smart grids, leveraging Quebec’s expertise in order to grow the province’s exports. From an initial core of six industry partners, the Equation project seeks to mobilize a broader community of strategic players from Quebec, Canada and around the globe.
