By Joel Makower

November 10, 2006 -- Exactly one year ago, Sun stepped forth to shine a light on energy efficiency in the information technology sector by introducing what it called "the world's first Eco-responsible processor," the UltraSPARC T1, promising customers millions of dollars in energy savings. Sun's research showed that the UltraSPARC T1 "could eliminate the number of Web servers in the world by half, slashing power requirements and having the same effect in reducing carbon dioxide emissions as planting one million acres of trees." All, the company said, without sacrificing performance.

At the same time, at Sun's Summit on 21st Century Eco-Responsibility, the company detailed how it was marrying eco-friendly product design with high-performance technologies. In doing so, it acknowledged the growing need for environmental leadership among all IT companies.

This was, to be sure, not done in a vacuum. Customers, especially those with endless banks of servers, were telling Sun and its competitors that the energy consumption of their products had become a serious issue -- that a modern data center could draw as much power as a good-sized city. With customers' growing concerns about climate change, along with their ongoing need to cut costs, energy use had become -- well, a powerful issue.

Sun's leadership did not go unnoticed. When Pacific Gas & Electric Company, one of the largest U.S. energy utilities, offered rebates as part of an energy-efficiency incentive program for computer servers, Sun's servers were the only ones that qualified.

Not bad, Sun. But what have you done for us lately?

Quite a bit, it seems, based on my recent conversation with Dave Douglas.

Moving Toward Sustainability

Douglas, Sun's Vice President, Eco-Responsibility, is responsible for the strategy and execution of Sun's environmental initiatives, including enhancements to Sun's products in the areas of energy efficiency, cooling technologies, product recycling, and clean manufacturing. Over the past year, Douglas has helped move Sun down the path to sustainability -- a journey, it is often said, and not a destination. With the climate issue growing ever more serious, Douglas and his team seem determined to find new and better solutions that help both customers and the planet.

"We deeply believe that being green can be good for business," Douglas told me recently. "I often joke that the 'eco' in my Eco-Responsibility title is half about ecology and half about economy. We're finding those playing off each other in some really interesting ways."

Douglas' sentiment places Sun among a small but growing corps of leadership companies that now recognize that being a more environmentally responsible enterprise is more than simply about "doing well by doing good." Increasingly, as General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt put it last year, "Green is green." That is, companies like Sun now see that being an environmental leader can yield new business opportunities: innovative new products that address customers' needs and society's growing expectations of business regarding pressing environmental issues. Like GE, which through its ecomagination campaign has harnessed sustainability as a key driver of revenue growth, Sun sees its energy-sipping chips as part of a larger strategy that can power sales and profits while providing a demonstrable environmental benefit.

Transforming the IT sector is no small task. "I saw an IDC report the other day that the cost of operating power servers is going to surpass the cost to buy them sometime in the next five years or so," says Douglas. "And when that starts to happen, that's a pretty big shift in people's mindsets. In some ways, IT is going to be important to sustainability."

But one might also ask "Is IT itself sustainable?" Says Douglas: "I think today we really have to answer, 'No, it's not.' It's using a lot of energy and generating a lot of waste."

Computing Is Becoming An Environmental Threat

The notion of computers as an environmental problem is not how it was supposed to be. Less than a decade ago, the networked world of computers and the Internet were going to yield net environmental benefits: they would dramatically reduce travel through the use of teleconferences, telework, and online shopping; dematerialize the business world through reduced paper use and the computer-aided design of more-efficient manufacturing processes; and generally allow us to do more business with fewer materials. And, indeed, they're doing all of these things.

But a funny thing happened on the onramp to the information superhighway. Computers became increasingly faster and more powerful in order to meet users' growing demands for bandwidth and processing power. And along the way, they demanded more energy and became outmoded faster, creating disposal problems.

"We build hundreds of thousands of servers every year, so tackling the server energy issue is at the forefront of all of our thinking these days," says Douglas. "It is estimated that the total greenhouse gas emissions of servers is upwards of 200 million tons of carbon dioxide in the U.S. alone right now. And if you gather up the worldwide statistics, I believe the number might be as high as a billion tons of CO2." That's a significant chunk of the roughly 27 billion tons emitted worldwide by all human activity each year.

Saving Energy Company-Wide

Sun's climate-related efforts aren't limited to its chips. Through its Open Work Practice, nearly half of Sun's 36,250 employees work from home whenever possible to avoid commuting. Sun enjoyed savings of more than $60 million last year from that program, says Douglas, through real estate reductions and energy savings, not to mention efficiency improvements. And the company has been working to reduce the energy needs of its own facilities. Beyond that, Sun donates high-performance computing time on its Sun Grid utility to climate scientists, and is a founding member of the Stanford Computational Earth and Environmental Science research facility, which is designed to drive energy savings, develop efficient technologies, and distill business benefits.

Given all the environmental challenges and opportunities, I asked Douglas, what does success look like for Sun? He offered a two-part answer.

"If you really play it out, we've got to make computing sustainable. And we've got a long way to go. And by extension, we've got to make a company like Sun that designs computers sustainable." That means continually reducing the environmental footprint not just of its products, but of the entire business, from its employees' daily work habits to the energy and resources needed to run every nook and cranny of its operations.

Ultimately, of course, it's about the customer, says Douglas. "If we're really out there and customers are saying 'We want to buy your servers because you are lowering our power bills,' or 'You're letting us make longer use of facilities that we thought were outdated because we were out of power' -- that kind of feedback from the market will show that we're starting to hit things on the button."