Kevin O'Marah from AMR Research claims that Green IT receives a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other green initiatives.  His blog has stirred some discussion in the office and here I'm weighing in on the topic.  Understandably, Kevin's post was likely intended to stir up discussion, so I realize I'm playing into what the blog was likely designed to accomplish.  (Oh, and try googling "carbon accounting" if you want to catch the hype curve.)

There's three main things to point out about Kevin's blog.  The first is that there is no such thing as "Green IT".  IT is inherently a dirty, polluting activity -- it doesn't generate clean energy and it has a carbon footprint.  We use IT because it makes our lives easier, and often has a lower carbon impact than other activities.  Certainly Google claims that using the web is less carbon intensive than driving to the library or store.  But before the days of Facebook, people still interacted.  In fact, it is a paltry 20-25g of CO2 to send a letter with the USPS, yet browsing through Facebook for an hour has the same carbon impact and (trust me) is practiced by a lot more people today than 5 years ago.  That adds up.  And while manufacturing is shrinking (count the number of aluminum plants that have closed), the use of IT is growing as companies look to consolidate operations and cut costs through the use of computing.  In case you haven't noticed, computing is the industrial produced commodity of the 21st centry.  IT will only become more of a problem, so why not get on top of it early with innovative technologies from the IT community itself.

Sentilla has actually worked on energy efficiency projects in industries other than data centers and IT.  In fact, our software is deployed at a large aluminum smelting facility in Canada, which undoubtably uses more electricity than even the largest of Google's data centers (note that both Google and Yahoo data centers are located in abandoned aluminum facilities due to the abundance of power).  But the problem with this market, as anyone who has dabbled in it will tell you, is that the industrial market is highly fragmented and customized with services.  No two manufacturing facilities are the same, and their similarities are few.  They consume not just electricity, but gasses, materials, and chemicals in a complex process to deliver iPods and toilet paper.  As a small venture-funded startup, most companies look to a leveraged scalable business model that is product and technology focused.  Selling solutions with services to large (slow moving) industrial companies (like manufacturing and logistics) is not scalable, fundable, nor profitable, at least for small businesses.  Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a big opportunity there for whoever can "crack the code" on a one-size-fits-all solution for industrial efficiency.

With all of this in mind, driving to a sustainable energy economy is a tremendously difficult task.  It affects every industry.  A discussion about "my efficiency project is better than yours" just discounts many of the laudable and innovative efforts going on today.  Five years ago, hot and cold aisles were mostly unknown and rarely practiced, now every data center is reconfiguring to do it because it just makes sense -- financially, operationally, and environmentally. 

To quote our CEO, Bob Davis, "What's the point of saying that other green efforts are nonsense?  That notion, in itself, is nonsense."