But what else can your company do to help fight against increasing energy costs and depleting energy supplies?  If you haven’t already, your IT staff should be looking into ways to green your Information Technology department.  With the increased power consumption of today’s advanced computer hardware and the growing quantity of discarded PCs and obsolete hardware, it is imperative for companies to show their customers what they are doing to better themselves and the communities around them.  Finding green alternatives in IT can actually help to lower a company’s costs, as well.

First, develop a strategy for going green.  This strategy can include simple changes, like reducing paper consumption, turning off all monitors and PCs at night and reducing travel with virtual conferences.  Further efforts can be made to find more energy-efficient equipment.  One good source for buying the most efficient desktops, laptops and monitors is the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool.  EPEAT is a system to help purchasers evaluate, compare and select electronic products based on their environmental attributes.  Another good source of information on measuring power efficiency can be found at The Green Grid, launched in 2007.  The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to developing and promoting energy efficiency for data centers and information service delivery.  The outcome of this non-profit organization’s work has been wide adoption of Green Grid-created metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Data center infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE), and others under development including Data Center Productivity (DCP).

In order to get your green projects underway, you will need to articulate the financial benefits to get funding for the plan.  One of the best ways to do this is to use the NPV (Net Present Value) approach.  NPV is used in capital budgeting to measure the difference between the present value of cash inflows and the present value of cash outflows, while being sensitive to the reliability of future cash inflows that an investment or project will yield.  NPV compares the value of a dollar today to the value of that same dollar in the future, taking inflation and returns into account.  For further information on selling your projects using NPV, Wikipedia actually has a very informative article which you can find here.