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Several articles have come out recently advertising the fact that we are “getting green, but not green enough. Some of you; like myself, may have found that puzzling. Particularly because it seems like almost daily that we see or read about another organization going green with some new initiative or another.

So why then all the cynicism?

Let’s view “Green” as a destination or a finish line of sorts. One would assume that we are getting closer to that goal simply through an availability heuristic facilitated by the media and all the hype surrounding green initiatives. However, the unfortunate truth is, we are getting further away from that goal daily.

Why?

As the Internet grows, demand for bandwidth is ever increasing. We are migrating towards a more sophisticated Internet with a multimedia focus. Increased demand for video, audio and large graphic files is on the rise. More and more people are getting wired by the minute globally and all this growth brings an exponentially larger demand for network hardware. Big data centers housing all this hardware can devour several megawatts of power, enough for a small city. Most of the power (60-70%) consumed in these data centers is used just to keep it cool.

Several efficiency improvements are reducing the amount of energy gulped up by network hardware appliances, but the industry’s overall electricity consumption could double from 2006 to 2011 as demand grows.

So are we getting green enough?

Not if you are looking at that finish line up ahead and it keeps getting further away. It’s a lot easier for companies to put out a big press release than to build a data center with a significantly smaller environmental footprint. The key is to make a real commitment to true environmental neutrality. Meaning, these organizations should look within at their own carbon output and come up with a real strategy to reduce it, or even become completely neutral. The technology is out there, more ">energy efficient servers exist and there are countless ways to improve the airflow in data centers with natural cooling. The EPA says a 45 percent improvement, enough to lower electricity usage by 2011, can be achieved with existing technologies.

So, let us not continue to applaud companies that announce they are twice as energy efficient than they used to be, when they are simultaneously gobbling up three times as many resources than before. We should require a more aggressive commitment from these organizations, instead of a cheap PR stunt. Too many of these companies are simply blowing a lot of smoke (pun intended :)).

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By Joshua Levitt
E-Commerce Sales and Marketing Manager for UsedCisco.com