The Western Digital Caviar® GP is 500 GB unit that touts both its power savings as well as its carbon reduction credentials.  It claims to consume 4-5 less watts than competitive models, saving up to $14 in annual electricity costs per unit per year. Western Digital calculates that this "equates to reducing CO² emission by up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year - the equivalent of taking a car off the road for 3 days each year."

Plan on seeing more IT products designed for green computing introduced over the coming year!

Active Power Management is implemented through software that allows an enterprise to control energy consumption of its desktop and/or data center equipment.  Typically, this is done through a central administrative function that can tune the power consumption of all computers on an enterprise network.

Compare with Behavioral Power Management.

More about Active Power Management at Vertatique's Computer Power Management Resources.

Behavioral Power Management encompasses the cultural changes within a community that result in manual power management practices that drive increased energy efficiency and reduced carbon emissions.

For example, Climate Savers Computing calculated:

A new trend in energy regulation is to give incentives to utilities that focus on conservation instead of consumption.  The practice is "decoupling" and California regulators have been practicing it for years.  Large Silicon Valley computer companies are the latest beneficiaries, getting paid by the utilities for improving the energy efficiency of their data centers. Hear/read the story at American Public Radio's Marketplace.

Those of us attuned to audio information can now get podcasts from Sun Micosystems, a company regularly covered by Vertatique. The podcasts cover green computing and other aspects of sustainability and technology. iTunes link: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1605516...

Vertatique has previously reported on web conferencing as an energy saving, carbon reducing technology. Audio conferencing is older and often delivers less of a sense of "presence", but remains a valuable green technology. Lloyds and KPMG report their results . . .

Here is an update on our past coverage of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, courtesy of New York Times tech columnist David Pogue. He offers a detailed review of the new machine, dubbed the XO, including its innovative energy features:

One sign that it is still early days for green computing can be seen in the intersection, or lack thereof, of two UK initiatives . . .

Europe's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive holds manufacturers "responsible for taking back and recycling electrical and electronic equipment.". While biomed device manufactures may have some short-term exemptions, the handwriting is on the wall . . .

This question is the title of a recent story in CIO Insight. The article opens:

"Green IT" lets companies put on their eco-friendly faces and proclaim their love of the environment. It is also a bean counter's dream, in which innovative uses of hardware and software drive down energy and infrastructure costs. But is the former just clever marketing to wrap around the latter, which includes initiatives businesses would be taking anyway?

My immediate reaction: "Does it really matter?" . . .