Coming down from the cloud

All businesses—from self-employed contractors to global corporations—rely on information technology (IT) and telecommunications to survive in the global market. While necessary, all that computing results in 2 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, according to a 2007 study by research firm Gartner Inc. While that might not sound like much—especially compared to the building industry’s 8 percent and the transportation sector’s 13 percent, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the IT industry is expected to continue to grow. More people are relying on smart phones, tablet PCs and devices such as the iPad, all of which largely rely on “cloud computing,” whereby information and services are delivered to each computer in real time via the Internet.

With the growth of that cloud, however, comes an increasing demand for energy. All the content being delivered in real time must be stored in data centers, which consume massive amounts of energy. So it’s no surprise that firms are feeling the pressure to create more energy-efficient IT solutions. While the range of solutions—referred to widely as green IT—is as broadly defined as the results of a Google search, there are huge opportunities for both software and technology developers as well as every company that uses IT for its business operations.   

Data center know-how
U.S. spending on IT products and services is forecast to grow to $514.5 billion in 2010, and is expected to reach $647.7 billion by 2014, according to a Q1 2010 report by Business Monitor International. Of all the opportunities in the growing green IT industry, data centers, the big facilities used to process and store information, get the most attention—and for good reason. The benefit of reducing the energy use of these huge buildings packed full of heat-generating servers (and regularly cooled by air conditioning) is a no-brainer.

The federal government is playing a huge role in jump-starting green IT projects. In January, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced it will grant $47 million to some of America’s biggest corporations for pilot projects that push the green IT envelope. Watching its own data centers grow from 432 in 1998 to more than 1,100 by 2009, the federal government also announced it would consolidate all of its data centers, asking individual agencies to assess redundancies and budget for green IT solutions in fiscal year 2012.

Google [Nasdaq: GOOG], one of the world’s largest search-engine companies, has good reason to invest in energy-efficient solutions for its data centers. Google’s “greening” of its data centers is perhaps the most high-profile project to date. While the Mountain View, Calif.–based company claims it has managed to cut energy usage in its data centers by more than 50 percent, it won’t discuss financial details concerning how much was invested in the data centers or how much the company is now saving. While Google is at times extremely secretive, the company made an uncharacteristic move when it hosted the Efficient Data Centers Summit in 2009 at its headquarters. It shared the work it had done to save energy at its data centers and even went so far as to post the conference hearings on YouTube. 

Yahoo! Inc. [Nasdaq: YHOO] recently unveiled plans for its new super efficient data center in Lockport, NY. Dubbed the Yahoo! Computing Coop, the facility —modeled after chicken coops at Tyson Foods [NYSE: TSN]—would rely on outside air to cool the building, which would leave as hot air through a centrally situated chimney, as reported by DataCenterKnowledge.com.