State Department likes green IT, but not yet sure how much

The State Department has launched several green technology initiatives, but officials have yet to develop ways to measure how much energy the projects save, the department's chief information officer said on Tuesday.

What is known is that powering information technology equipment can cost a lot. At its Harry S. Truman Building headquarters in Washington, IT accounts for nearly 50 percent of the electric bill. The power is enough to operate more than 3,500 U.S. households annually, State's Chief Information Officer Susan Swart said.

State is working to meet criteria set by the Energy Star program, which the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department manage to promote energy-efficient products and practices, and the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, which the Green Electronics Council oversees to help agencies evaluate electronic products based on environmental attributes.

State wants to increase the proportion of its servers using virtual or blade technology from 40 percent to 75 percent. It also plans to purchase products that are Energy Star rated. All the servers and 90 percent of the monitors the department now purchases are rated. The requirements clauses are built right in to the contracts, Swart said.

The savings are hard to measure. For example, she said by deploying a power management program at the Truman building, State estimates it will save $2 million annually. But those savings do not come back to IT departments, which creates "complications," Swart said. "It's hard to capture costs."

The upfront costs of installing the technology can outweigh the benefits, she added. The new federal data center near Denver will achieve LEED gold certification. To attain the higher level of platinum, State would have had to install solar panels, but the new source of power would not have produced enough energy to operate the entire center. To recoup the cost of installing the panels would have been about 40 years, Swart said. That would have been too long.

"There's no incentive," Swart said, discussing why the shift to green IT seems to be slow. "That's the problem."

Convincing employees to follow green processes can be difficult, Swart said, but for now managers are not forcing them to change. Instead, State is encouraging workers to think about altering their behavior, and senior leaders are trying to set an example by making changes themselves. For example, some managers previously had printers at their desks, but they now share printers with other employees to save energy and space.