There are, however, a couple of promising trends. First is that the leaders are publicly setting environmental and energy targets and reporting their performance against them. This serves to provide guidance to companies that are new to considering the topic.

Second, the leading companies are integrating environmental and energy metrics into their supplier scorecards. By asking value chain partners to reduce environmental impact and energy intensity, it will drive their supply base to look for efficiencies and for many companies the CIO will find the low-hanging fruit.

Use Energy Efficiency Benchmarks

David Kepler: How you approach this issue is a primary function of who you are as a company. Approximately 8 percent of the world’s energy is used in the manufacturing of chemicals. Virtually all things that are manufactured require chemistry somewhere in the value chain. So energy efficiency is built into how we act and how we manage with our customers. We have had energy as part of our economic evaluation of computer equipment purchases for 25 years at least, primarily because we evaluate them the same way we evaluate other chemical manufacturing equipment.

Our IT-related energy savings are small relative to the overall company, but we have an established mind-set about reducing them. A few years ago we went to automatic configurations of monitors. We had more than 40,000 workstations in use globally. At the time, according to the announcement we posted on our intranet, we were conserving more than 45 million kilowatt-hours annually. This translated into enough energy to power 4,365 homes for a year and it saved $2.5 million in electricity costs. For those that want to do their own calculations; see the Energy Star site.

Klustner: That’s a very important point. Energy efficiency is simply a component of operational efficiency. We’ll know when green IT has reached the mainstream when IT energy efficiency is viewed as an integral requirement to reduce operational costs.

The government’s Energy Star program David refers to has been instrumental in bringing focus to the energy waste of IT devices including PC monitors. And their efforts to get PC and monitor manufacturers to integrate Energy Star settings into their devices is a fundamental advancement. However, the settings alone don’t realize energy savings. They must be enforced. This study from the Department of Energy and others indicate that upwards of 80 percent of end users disable these settings.

Meanwhile, the Energy Star settings don’t provide benchmarking and ongoing energy audits and measurement.