Can business spark a green energy revolution?

How responsible are businesses for climate change? While some companies are "dirtier" than others, it appears there is a growing consensus across the business community that they have a huge responsibility to address the causes of climate change and there are signs that a new pro-active approach to supporting renewable energies might be emerging.

Before the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali at the beginning of December an axis of 150 businesses including Nokia and Nike called for legally binding global agreements on carbon emission reductions.

"It represents a massive change in business opinion on climate change. Business now realizes that the cost of action is cheaper than the cost of inaction," Craig Bennett, Development Director, University of Cambridge Program for Industry, told CNN. (Watch the interview.)

Reports such as the Stern Review on the economics of climate change have galvanized businesses into thinking that they can't wait for governments to agree international standards on carbon emissions and need to take the initiative.

It has been largely down to individual companies to take the lead in making their products and operations energy efficient and to develop more progressive policies towards renewable energy.

Technology and transport companies, whose products and services are some of the most conspicuous consumers of energy and emitters of carbon dioxide, have made some of the largest commitments to energy efficient policies and investments in recent years - GE has a green product development program and Virgin has committed itself to spend $3bn to invest in renewable energy companies.

As public awareness of the energy costs of other aspects of our lives grow, from food miles to online computer habits, so too it seems has the responsibility of IT companies.

Every 18 months computer processing speed doubles, but with the increase in technological innovation comes the rise in energy consumption.

One of the hidden forms of energy consumption comes from data centers and so called server farms. For every mouse click, email sent, or friend poked on Facebook, servers in a data centre whir into action fed by a distant power plant. According to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency energy consumption of data centers doubled between 2001 and 2006 and will do again by 2011. In the U.S, data centers consumed 1.5 percent of total energy consumption.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative was set up by Intel and Google to improve the energy efficiency of computers and serves. In partnership with the World Wildlife Fund's Climate Savers pact, and joined by other IT companies including IBM and Sony, it has agreed to cut the amount of carbon dioxide emissions for the computer industry by 2010 by the equivalent of 10 coal-fired power plants.

Going beyond the greenwash

A more progressive move was made by Google when it announced in November 2007, that its philanthropic arm, google.org, will be investing millions in renewable energy sources in an initiative called Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE

"We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."

"Google.org's hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal."

Businesses may have been going green for some years now, but direct investment in renewable energies is a new trend and one that Jed Emerson, Senior Fellow of Generation Foundation, an organization that supports sustainable development, sees is in many companies' long-term interests and essential for developing alternative energy.

"Business has a critical role in advancing renewable energies since finding those alternatives must entail a business approach to help ensure they are increasingly efficient and cost effective," says Emerson.

For technology companies, from those that produce hardware to service providers, reducing carbon emissions and kick-starting the renewable energy industry appears to be vital to their long-term success.

"Companies are finding they must be innovative, both in terms of how they pursue their core business model and how they position themselves for success in future markets. While access to energy is obviously key for any firm, for Google it has been an especially significant expense, mainly having to do with the size and consumption levels of their server farms."

Hewlett Packard, the world's biggest technology company, is another IT firm that has seen good business sense in reducing its carbon footprint, announcing in November 2007 that it will install a large-scale solar power installation at its facility in San Diego and buy 80 gigawatt-hours of wind energy to make 90 percent of their power in Ireland from renewable sources.

"While some [businesses] may be looking for a 'silver bullet', it is more likely that the answers will be found in 'silver buckshot' -- a variety of new technologies which together will provide us with new solutions and approaches to our energy needs," says Emerson.

Regardless of inter-governmental consensus on renewable energy and carbon emissions, Emerson believes that the market place is best placed to advance the technology of renewable energy and their application.

"The market place is best positioned to efficiently sort through and vet these competing ideas, just as investor dollars will begin to sort out those ideas and products with the greatest potential for consumer and business markets."

What do you think? Join the debate and have your say.

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I believe it is more than just energy consumption that needs to be addressed by business. Business needs to consider what becomes of those products that, in the case of the technology companies, are rendered obsolete or outmoded or unfashionable. A recycling strategy that minimizes dumping equipment with toxic components in poor third world countries. It should no longer be how many, how fast and how cheaply can we make and sell these items but what is our strategy to recover and reuse the materials for the next generation of product on the horizon.

Are we going to just continue to produce more and more until we can no longer sustain not just our current lifestyles, but our very existence? Are we going to create so much pollution and refuse and foul the environment so badly that it will no longer sustain us. Surely humanity is better than a bacterium or virus culture that grows exponentially until it fouls its own environment so badly with it's own waste that it dies, or a cancer that feeds off it's host and eventually kills the host and itself?

Each of us has a strong tendency to try and gain power over other people, things and situations. A business person is profit oriented by nature, a thinker and a doer. What is it if not power motivated? Green people who are idealistically motivated see big business as the destroyer of this one world we all live in. They go as far as forcing their will upon others, too. Through militancy, the green people want to enforce their ideals. However, all parties agree to live in a balanced sustainable world. Environmentalists will be more successful if they don't make direct war to change the mentality of business people.

People respond in ample measure when they see a good thing. Renewable energy is an idea whose time has come.