Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » Report: Green tech could save Feds nearly $275M per year

January 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Report: Green tech could save Feds nearly $275M per year

TAGS: Energy conservation

Efficiency doesn't tend to be a hallmark of the federal government, which might explain why the words government contract induces salivating amongst some CXOs the way bells caused Pavlov's pups to slobber.

Green technology stands to reduce some of that wasteful tax-fueled inefficiency, a proposition presented by HP and Intel in a couple of reports titled "Go Green Power Play" and "Go Green PC Power Play" aimed at the U.S. federal government.

The short of it: Were the Feds to upgrade all of their PCs, monitors, and servers to energy-efficient alternatives, and were they to adopt some power-saving technologies like virtualization, they could save taxpayers around $275 million in energy costs per year, according to the reports from HP and Intel. In the process, the sustainability move would ease the pressure on the nation's overstrained power grid by one billion kWh per year.

Breaking it down, HP and Intel assert in "Go Green Power Play" that the Feds could drive down their datacenter energy costs, estimated at around $479.5 million annually, by as much as 40 percent (that is, around $192 million) by employing various green technologies. Those include virtualization, consolidation, better cooling technology (specifically HP's own Dynamic Smart Cooling and Thermal Mapping technologies), more energy-efficient IT systems (specifically Intel-powered machines from HP), and power-distribution efficiencies.

The figures are based on IDC's estimation that the current installed server base of the U.S. Department of Defense and civilian agencies is just under 600,000, that each server currently consumes 2,000 kWh per year, and that the average energy cost is 10 cents per kWh.

In the PC-oriented "Go Green" report, HP and Intel suggest that the Feds could save more than $82.4 million annually in energy costs by upgrading all their Energy Start 3.0-compliant desktops, laptops, and monitors to Energy Star 4.0 models. Activating power-management features to ensure machines power down when not in use plays into the savings equation.

Here, the report assumes Feds are powering around 4.5 million desktops, 440,000 CRT monitors, nearly 4 million LCD monitors, and just over a million laptops.

A final point in all this: The Feds aren't the only ones who could benefit from investing in some of those green-tech upgrades. This kind of energy waste is rampant at organizations large and small. It certainly scales impressively in the context of the government's vast fleet of systems, but organizations of all sizes could stand to assess their respective situations. There's plenty of potential gain, both monetary and environmental, to be reaped.

Posted by Ted Samson on January 24, 2008 04:40 PM

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