Forget about temporary fluctuations in power costs. We need a new way of thinking green if we want lasting impact InfoWorld jumped on the green IT bandwagon early. We launched a Green Tech Center, set up a Green 15 awards program, produced a green tech InfoClip, and held live panel discussions on green datacenters at our Virtualization Executive Forum.Most important of all, back in February 2007, Test Center Senior Analyst Ted Samson launched his groundbreaking Sustainable IT blog. In his first post, Ted listed four reasons to go green: to save money, to reduce the impact of an imminent energy crisis, to garner good green PR, and to help the environment. So two years after we began this odyssey, how is green IT doing? Without question, we’ve seen great success stories. But if you want to know how the average CIO feels about it today, just look him or her in the eye and talk up the benefits of going green. Very likely, you’ll get a glare back that says: Are you joking? Do you know the kind of pressure we’re under just keeping the lights on? If you want to talk to me about cutting energy costs without having to buy new equipment, that’s one thing. Otherwise, peddle that green stuff elsewhere. Now, with energy costs dropping, and budgets expected to flatten or decline, resistance could harden even further. That’s why I think it’s time to redefine green IT and kick the concept up a level. As Ted has noted many times in his blog, green IT goes beyond the datacenter to supply-chain optimization, effective telecommuting, desktop power conservation, and more. Contributor Betsy Harter’s important article, “Tech’s looming battle against rising energy costs,” argued that IT has a unique potential to green entire organizations, from aiding in HVAC efficiency to optimizing truck routes. This broader view must take root now because we’re at a crossroads. On the one hand, the recent drop in energy costs (although no doubt temporary) could cause the green issue to fall off the table once again. On the other, we have both presidential candidates declaring that investment in green technology should be a part of our economic recovery. The role the tech industry could play in this renaissance could be enormous. The shift to clean power generation will take trillions of dollars and perhaps decades, but power conservation has an immediate effect — and tech has the tools and experience to make it happen. Way back in 2004, Jon Udell wrote in his InfoWorld blog about the energy Web, a smart power grid that would parallel the Internet in its architecture, with every node — from storage array to water heater — designed to optimize power consumption to an amazing level of granularity. By one estimate, for example, smart appliances connected to the energy Web could allow an entire household to consume as little power as today’s average refrigerator. Now’s the time for this kind of thinking. Yes, green IT has reduced power consumption significantly in some datacenters. But we’re entering a new era and a new potential for tech, where the power conservation expertise we’ve applied to our narrow domain can have a truly broad impact. An energy Web is exactly the right way to think about the problem. Technology Industry