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

favor of the border adjustment plan. The American Iron and Steel Institute,
on the other hand, favors barring imports from countries whose steel produc-
tion is dirtier than the United States.

Role of the EPA

Whereas government regulations on carbon emissions are not specific to
IT, the EPA has been busy generating government information aimed at
improving energy efficiency for IT. The EPA produced a report to the U.S.
Congress on August 2, 2007, titled “Report to Congress on Server and Data
Center Energy Efficiency—Public Law 109-431.” This was part of the EPA’s
ENERGY STAR program. This section describes the U.S. government’s role
(mostly through the EPA) in encouraging the implementation of green IT.
One significant government role is in the area of incentives, and this chapter
describes the different government incentives for establishing green data cen-
ters. The information in this section was taken from the August 2007 report
previously mentioned.
The EPA has more than a decade of history of advancing energy efficiency ptg
in IT equipment as well as commercial buildings, beginning with the first
ENERGY STAR specifications for computers established in 1992 and the
Green Lights program established in 1991. Through the ENERGY STAR
program, the EPA now qualifies a wide array of IT products, including per-
sonal computers, imaging equipment, printers, and monitors. The EPA has
made particular strides in addressing standby energy and power management
for these products, demonstrating that it is possible to encourage rapid devel-
opment and adoption of energy-efficient technologies and practices. The
energy savings from efficiency improvements in these products are currently
in the billions of dollars per year (U.S. EPA 2006). The EPA has also devel-
oped an innovative commercial building rating system that helps owners and
managers assess the energy performance of their buildings and target effi-
ciency improvements.
In January 2006, the EPA convened the first national conference dedicated
to examining energy-savings opportunities for enterprise servers and data
centers. Representatives from the utility, financial services, healthcare,
Internet, and manufacturing sectors attended the conference (http://www.
energystar.gov/datacenters). The EPA is now working on the first priority
identified in that conference: the development of objective measurements of
server energy performance, on which future efficiency criteria would be
based.