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The Greening of IT
18 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

to the compute load. So, where are the other 1.5 watts going? According
to an Institute white paper, many solutions that can improve energy effi-
ciency by 25 percent to 50 percent are technically feasible today with
little or no new capital expense. The problem is that performance meas-
ures for data center staff are related to uptime and software integra-
tion/enhancement projects: There is no sizeable upside for their
professional careers in data center energy efficiency. That’s because the
largest stakeholders on energy efficiency, the CFO and the CIO, aren’t
usually part of the strategic conversation. For example, although fluid
cooling rather than air conditioning reduces cooling requirements by
approximately 60 percent to 70 percent, most CIOs are not ready to
spend their operations budget on the investment; to them, it just doesn’t
seem as critical as other budget items related to business applications
growth.

The Future of Regulations as External Factors for Change

Looking to the IT department for leadership on sustainability gives you ptg
a splendid opportunity to study the “spinal cord” of the organization.
After all, the biggest product and business process innovations need to be
affected by—or directly affect—the IT infrastructure. The urgency and
the critical need to analyze energy spending today are driven by the utility
industry’s move toward demand-based pricing. This is discussed in more
detail in Chapter 5, “The Magic of ‘Incentive’—The Role of Electric
Utilities,” on the role of electric utilities.

Overall Motivation for Executives to Move to
Green Data Centers

A study commissioned by chip maker AMD in 2007 found that data
center servers and related infrastructure worldwide doubled their energy
consumption between 2000 and 2005. In the United States alone, data
centers required five billion watts of electricity, equivalent to the output
of five 1,000 MW power plants. This level of energy consumption makes
data centers among the most significant contributors to global carbon
dioxide emissions and, therefore, to global warming. About two percent
of global carbon emissions are due to the direct effects of IT usage, espe-
cially data centers.