Earth Day warning for green IT

In a similar vein, Alcatel Lucent launched its GreenTouch consortium in January, which comprises 16 founding members from industry, academia and government labs to help invent and deliver these radical new energy efficiency improvements.

"Our goal is a 1,000-fold improvement in the energy efficiency of communications networks, and to deliver the critical enabling technologies in five years," said Gee Rittenhouse, head of research at Bell Labs.

However, Mark O'Neill, head of service management and green learning consultancy at BCS, and author of soon-to-be-released book Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice, argued that misconceptions about the costs of green IT are still rife, and obstruct the implementation of more widespread green measures.

"There's a strong feeling that being green costs money. A lot of IT managers don't realise that energy-saving measures could save them money. This is true of reducing carbon emissions as well as more common energy-saving measures," he said.

"Large corporations are ahead in energy-efficiency, however, and a lot of their 'green' measures are in part political or PR tools."

Others agree that there's a long way to go, and that the bigger challenges are ahead.

"In 2010 we are at the beginning of the end of what I refer to as Green IT Phase 1. Phase 1 was about the low hanging fruit in the datacentre and at the desktop," said Mingay.

"Green IT phase 2 will be harder because the low hanging fruit has gone, and the business case is less clear cut."

Mingay argued that, although the Greenpeace report had good intentions and was correct in its basic message, it missed the point.

"Greenpeace confused terms and ironically cited the potential key to greater energy efficiency - cloud computing - as the culprit. Really, its critique should have been leveled against IT in general," he said.

"Cloud computing has the potential to substantially improve green IT. It's the big area, if properly utilised. At the moment there have been great attempts to improve green IT, but it's been mainly incremental, small steps. Cloud could change this."

Anceirto and Mingay agreed that, for IT to really be green, it needs to be low carbon as well as energy efficient.

"Being low carbon is crucial to the green agenda, but I'm not sure whether the measuring tools are really available at the moment. A lot of firms don't really know their carbon footprint," said Ascierto.

At the moment it seems that green improvements are driven and complicated by other considerations.

"Their heart is not really in it. Google is a good example of this. There are no figures for greenhouse gas emissions or targets. There's no evidence that they're really doing anything," said Mingay.

"For things to really change there needs to be greater transparency and better messaging. So on Earth Day 2010 I'd give IT organisations and the IT industry collectively a 'B minus'."